Land for Sale

A local paper the "LA Alternative" published a story on how the Federal government is goinig to sell 85,000 acres of California National Forest to pay for some rural roads and schools. Here's the story in the LA Times: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-forests11feb11,0,1552161.story?coll=la-home-local

Here's a copy of my letter to the editor in response. We'll see if it gets published.

Thank you for the article entitled "Forests for Sale" in the February 17th edition of LA Alternative about the Bush Administration's plan to sell off 85,000 acres of land in California. It occurred to me that this is not actually the Bush Administration's land to sell, and is in fact your land and our land, to paraphrase the Woodie Guthrie tune. Why should we have to buy our own land? A fair way to transition this land from political to personal ownership is for our lawmakers to divide it up into small equal partitions and then give the partitions away via lottery to the people of this great nation. Then individuals can decide how to develop, or preserve and protect their partition of land and the only role for government would be to protect the civil property rights of the land owners, as it should be doing anyway. If the Bush Administration needs to raise money for rural roads and schools, perhaps they should look first to ending one or two of its seemingly never-ending and pointless foreign wars. There's a few billion ill-spent dollars for you that I'm sure could be put to better use.

Peter "Pedro" De Baets