Well, drones have to stay under 500 ft, actually it's under 400 feet. So now how low do we bring this discussion? https://www.nifc.gov/drones/blm/FAA%20Part%20107%20Fact%20Sheet.pdf And there isn't a century of precedent on that. But we figured it out.

So you admit that private property rights aren’t absolute, and in fact the airspace is subject to certain easements for the purposes of travel?

Also, since you argued against the explicit text of 5th amendment in this very thread, why are you bringing legal precedent where the 5th amendment and the governments right of eminent domain was cited as a defense of your position?

No. To do so violates and upsets over 100 years of legal precedent upon which property has been bought and sold.

Kind of like pistol brace bans.

No, I admit that property rights have been violated in the past. Not that they should have been.


I guess you admit that you already knew, as a pilot, that this was a long-contested issue, and you just were trying to find a 'gotcha' point, right?

Because that's all you have. You can't make honest arguments here. I've already shot all of them down.

Because property owners bought and sold under the system imposed upon them, in good faith.

I took his statement as could, not that he would. I see it as an example of how ridiculous the argument is for people to say corner crossers are violating airspace when their body parts cross private property. Class G airspace starts at the surface and goes up the the next airspace. It's a precedent that's been around for ever, otherwise city slickers moving to the country would have shut down the aerial application industry sometime in the last 90 years

Drones have to stay on the ground in a lot of 'public' lands.

https://www.nps.gov/articles/unmanned-aircraft-in-the-national-parks.htm

Ain't that something. It's YOUR LAND according to the zeitgeist of this thread. Why aren't you people raising a stink over that?

No, not people like me.

I was plainly stating what is legal and lawful according to Part 103 in the FAA regs.  

I never said I'd personally do it (I wouldn't), but it is entirely legal for me to do so.

The whole "my airspace" argument is a red herring and doesn't mean a thing to the FAA.

Yup, and it eventually got settled that private property rights weren’t absolute with regards to airspace, specifically with the regards to the right of travel. The 5th amendment, unfortunately for you and these landowners, is a thing.

Again, and try not dodge the question this time, if arowneragain was supreme commander of the universe, would a pilot need to gain permission from a landowner prior to flying over?

When I bought my property, I understood there wasn’t a highway going through it.

The government can put one there if it’s deemed necessary for travel, just like the government of Colorado can put an easement between two public parcels. Because of the travel between them isn’t legal as you argue, they have the right to make it so per the 5th amendment.

That’s pretty well established legal precedent is it not?

He doesn't care.

Some of your fellow posters criticize me for referring to hypotheticals. Yet you want me to stretch myself into further hypotheticals.

I’ve already won the argument. No point in reviving it over retarded hypotheticals.

My answer to your question is that your question is stupid and irrelevant. If you ask again, my answer will be that the asker is stupid. Hypothetically.

Well the NPS isn't the BLM. And I'm not raising a stink over drones on NPS because I only mentioned them to discuss airspace, and that airspace does not always start at 500 feet. There is definitely open airspace below 500 feet.

Not morally. Again, that’s a mistake the founders made. Much immorality has ensued from it.

If you’re offended by this argument, that’s idolatry. They were just men.

Correct.

I’m aware, I just like putting on display why you should never get your head too far up the ass of your own ideology.

It’s nothing personal against arowneragain, I’d be doing the same thing if some communist came here and argued in favor of seizing all private property.

It’s literally the point of your argument.

I don’t think I (or anyone watching) believes I lost, considering you eventually had to admit you thought the founders “got it wrong” on the 5th amendment, but keep telling yourself that.

Seizing all private property, seizing some private property......

Remind me again what the Catholics said about the Albigensians?

Had to admit?

Had to? I've freely argued that for years. They're men, not gods. You're royally screwed up if you think otherwise. They/re. Not. God.

The founders made a grievous error by not having the foresight to know that a day would come in which ranchers would assert that they have Squatter’s Rights to land which isn’t theirs.

Attached File

LOL You didn't win shit.

When I bought my property there was an easement on it so someone else could access their land. More land came up for sale between our land and a river. (Basically a peninsula created by a bend in the river. We bought it after consulting an attorney because (and this is shocking) apparently it is not uncommon for an easement to be granted if it is required for someone to access their property. Now I would love to win by some magical non-binding combination of “that’s the way it’s always been” and a “founding fathers wouldn’t have allowed it” but apparently our attorney wasn’t worth a crap and didn’t bring up those mighty arguments that have been used here to quash every other argument. I think I will sell it. Heck, whoever buys it can’t get to it in any practical way. I suppose a helicopter, but who’s going to do that!

Well it’s there, and it’s pretty explicit. I’m guessing they put at there for a reason and not without a debate on its merits. I’m willing to bet if they were here right now, they’d be just fine with using it for this scenario.

Meh.... that's not a reason not to do it.  I may have purchased a property because for generations the government owned land next door to it which was fallow and untended giving me a huge expansive open view.  That's why I bought it and wanted it.  That doesn't in any way mean that it can't be sold, used as something unpleasant for me to look at etc.

The checkerboard didn't come about by accident.  It was created to make it possible to bar entry to huge swathes of land by purchasing far less than otherwise needed.  That creates a benefit to the owners no doubt but it's not one they are entitled to demand be maintained forever.  That's the deal when you bargain with the devil.  you may have the majority view needed to maintain your benefit for a time but that might not always remain so.

@Aimless can you add a poll asking if arowneragain won this argument?

Unless arowneragain doesn’t think such issues should be solved… Democratically.

And fight to defend it in bad faith because they're making a shitload of money renting public property back to its actual owners on day trips.

They're not responsible for the harm that was caused when it was created.   They are responsible for the harm they cause by fighting to perpetuate it.

I wouldn't hold a slaveowner responsible for inheriting slaves.  The harm of enslavement was caused by someone else.   But I would hold him responsible for not setting them free.   It is new harm caused for the sake of personal gain with only the flimsiest veil of "property rights" to defend it.

I’m curious about the “100 years of legal precedent” how many cases have been brought up by folks trying to step over 8 square inches of someone’s property in that (checkerboard) situation? I’m particularly interested in higher court rulings as they are sure to be cited. Now if it’s some local court I’m still interested, but not nearly as much. That court was likely as not to have been in the rancher’s pocket.

You’re appealing to democracy to determine truth. I rest my case. Epic fail.

The joke went right over your head (just like that airplane.)

Did they truly buy and sell under good faith?
Or were they making these purchases with the knowledge they'd lay claim to public lands and effectively take ownership over them without purchasing or paying taxes for them?
Properties bordered by wink-wink-nudge-nudge "public" land.
Especially in the days before you could helicopter yourself in.

To paraphrase Thomas Sowell, isn't it greed to want to take somebody else's (the public's) money (land)?

The entire point of government in our Anglo-Saxon legal tradition is that all rights originate with the people but some rights are necessary to surrender (partially or whole) for the common good.

The US constitution is literally a list of rights that the people surrendered to the Federal government.   The same goes for your State constitution.

Now, you can call a limited and enumerated infringement on the absolute right in private property an immoral injustice that the framers were foolish and short-sighted to create... but you cannot cite an ancient and hallowed right of people to own land with no recourse for others to own or access land beyond it.

Hell, prior to common ownership of automobiles, and an extensive network of highways and farm to market roads, etc... almost no one could access them anyways.

We're not even talking about people being able to drive their 4 wheelers across the corners.   Just hunters being able to access just as far as they can walk from the corner of the closest vehicle-accessible public property.   The vast majority of that checkerboard land would remain untouchable for 99.999 percent of the public because they cannot reach it by walking.

Unless the landowners dig in and maybe wind up with some kind of easement solution from the government.  And depending on how that works, maybe wind up with people able to drive vehicles to their destination across the corners.

Haha I got the reference… Pretty much lol.

I’m not sure that you’ve “won” the argument…

The people who think that public property is evil, or that somehow walking over air is trespassing and counts for "damages"... thanks for being everything wrong with this country.

I don’t know where I stand on this ordeal. I see both sides of the argument. I believe in private property rights. I also don’t like the idea of ranchers using public lands to profit and attempting to keep everyone else out to protect their gig. My opinion here doesn’t mean much. I don’t live in an area where this would likely affect me. I have found myself on private property a couple of times by accident while riding dirt bikes and hiking and in every case an apology from me and nice conversation with the landowner got me new places to ride. If they had told me to get lost I’d have still issued an apology and not come back. Just the way it is.

I own a tiny bit of property compared to any of the people were talking about but it’s enough to hunt on. I'd be pissed if someone were out there shooting without my permission. If they knocked on my door and we had a conversation about it,  I'd most likely tell them to be safe and have fun. Would I give a shit if someone walked across it? Nope.

I think the ones that are making money from the arrangement are probably the only ones that give a damn if someone goes out there to hunt.

Arowneragain, I respect your argument because it's been focused on one issue this entire thread. You've stuck to your guns and I feel like you believe in your argument at your core.

Stevelish, we didn’t see your true motive for several pages. It sounds like you're using a grazing lease on public land to sell hunting trips and other people using that public land would cut into it.

@arowneragain, my question to you is this, and I’m not being argumentative.

If we ignore a part of the fifth amendment that we don’t like, ie the portion that gives the government the power to take land through due process. Does that set precedent to ignore other amendments like the first and second?

I, like you study history. I know the founding fathers were certainly not gods lol. Some were about as far from it as you can be.

I appreciate the spirit in which you ask. I will do my best to reply in the same spirit.

The founders wrote *almost* the best man-created documents in history (I believe the AoC were superior) and they're the best that we have. I can't change the wording of the 5A and wouldn't do so. I'll simply fight every step of the way against using it to justify any particular taking, particularly when such takings don't fix a current violation of natural rights. That's the only way we keep that tiger in its cage.

My argument is that we should note the flaws in the documents (the federal power to tax and federal power to ED land; in short, any wording that cedes power to .fedgov is dangerous) and avoid those parts at all cost, fight them tooth and nail every step of the way when they try to use those mechanisms, and force them to be used as worst-case last resorts. The founders undoubtedly meant well when they wrote the protection against takings without just compensation. But such words are still interpreted daily by psychopaths that see them not as a protection to the citizen but a license to the government. Liberty says 'you can't steal property from me'. Big government says 'well, we can if we compensate you, and we get to determine what that looks like'. You can't sit on both sides of that debate.

So when someone says we should invoke the 5A takings clause to grant government more property (easements are property) than it already owns, to fix a problem rooted in existing government ownership, and their reason isn't national security or a one-time emergency, but rather......deer hunting and hiking....not only do I see that as stupid, but I see it as evil. It's not a morally sterile error. It's a revelation of some royally psychopathically jacked up priorities. The person who says 'yeah, just write an easement' is saying that they'd use a howitzer to kill a mouse in their living room.

I like to hunt. But I cannot in good conscience see me recreating as a reason for one iota of expansion of government power (power defined as the property/assets they control and what they do with them). I have spent most of my life hunting *mostly* on private land and paying my own way and I recognize that ultimately nothing is 'free' and there's a cost to having 'free' stuff, and it doesn't matter whether we're talking about access to healthcare or access to recreational lands. I don't want to be 'free' to have free stuff. I want to be 'free' from overbearing government. That has always been the essence of left versus right, communists versus liberty - you either strive for free stuff or strive for freedom from tyrannical government. The two rarely meet. I'd say they never meet. And on this issue, the hordes fall on the side of striving for stuff, not freedom from tyrants. They want to give the tyrants more power so they can have more free stuff. This is no different, morally, than if the left wanted to use the 5A to justify forcing doctors to treat (essentially ED'ing the labor of a doctor) patients under a federal healthcare mandate. It's evil. Pure and simple evil. And if I'm the only person on this entire website that will stand and call it that, I'll stand alone.

When we lived in Mississippi we saw citizens cry foul when crooked road supervisors built 'roads to nowhere' with public funds. They'd get elected then pave their dirt roads to benefit their own property, not the public at large, and that's exactly what would happen here - a handful of citizens would benefit from this government 'taking' of easements. We'd spend millions in legal fees just to get a bigger and more expensive government for the benefit of a tiny minority of citizens. Yeah, sure, in theory 'everyone' would benefit - greater access to some admittedly cool places - but only a tiny minority would ever actually use them, and none of it would be out of any sort of actual necessity. The entire premise of federal lands, especially BLM wasn't to provide recreation. Recreation wasn't on anyone's radar back then. The purpose was to oversee sales of land from government hands into the hands of private citizens, and the various agencies ended up overseeing what was left as reserves for strategic reasons (such as timber needed for national defense or extractive mining of resources needed to build an economy) or for grazing (because right or wrong, they saw a need for making use of lands that nobody actually wanted to buy - people wanted to graze the land, not own it, again, for reasons right or wrong). To insert a complete history of federal land ownership here would be awesome but would take a million words and would spawn decades of debates about what was right, what was wrong, how it could/should have been done differently.....it's beyond my scope, and frankly beyond my ability here. Suffice to say that all acreage in proximity to the landlocked parcels in question were once federal, and were once sold extremely cheap, and it wouldn't have mattered an iota in history if the landlocked parcels had been lumped in with other transfers. The Continental US is almost 2 billion acres and we're talking about 15 million acres of landlocked land that, once upon a time, had virtually no value. They literally couldn't give parts of it away and kept it only for administrative purposes, in some cases.

Our federal government - that was supposed to own only 'forts, ports, and ten miles square' for strictly defensive and administrative purposes - now owns about 600 million acres of land. Between 580 million and 640 million depending on who you ask and when you ask. And maybe ~1.5% of that is landlocked. So people come here and say that having virtually unlimited access to hundreds of millions of acres isn't enough - they want access to the last ~10 million (or less, speaking strictly of federal holdings) acres. Same with state ownership - states variously own about 200 million acres and maybe 3% of that is landlocked. So the issue here is that the ~800 million acres of fed/state lands aren't enough, we need access to that last ~2%, for deer hunting, and the government should just steal some easements to make it happen.

This is not a crisis. This is not a reason to invoke eminent domain. This is not a reason to take private property rights, even from bastards we don't like, even from people who manipulate a system for their own selfishness. Never in history has a government agenda aimed at 'hurting those bad people' stopped there. Give them an inch and they'll take a mile, every time. It's frankly embarrassing that with our current government and its history of using every possible thing it does, against its citizens in some way, virtually nonstop for most of my lifetime, anyone on the right could scan the current political landscape and think there's any reason to give government anything else. Has nobody learned anything in the last 40 years? Or the last century since we started the infernal revenue service?

As a side note I have been in some (multiple, actually) aspect of the real estate business for several years now. I will freely and happily tell you that property ownership brings out the worst in people, makes otherwise honest people do crooked things, and.....oh, the stories I could tell, if I could tell them at all. And putting a value on property an owner doesn't want to sell (which is to say, they value it higher than anyone else - otherwise they'd sell it!) is impossibly nebulous. You cannot imagine how adding a few acres of land to an appraisal increases its complexity. So I believe, as much as I believe the sun rose this morning, that forcibly taking rights from a morally crooked person has consequences infinitely worse than allowing them to be crooked and simply encouraging other people to beware of them. You can't fix every problem. To attempt such is to go down the path of the political left - they start out trying to solve a few little problems and end up with 250 million dead people in the last ~century.

It's been pointed out before that I am philosophically opposed to government land ownership (because owned land is possessed power, and I believe in a weak government - AoC weak, or less). But if given the chance, I wouldn't change existing federal land ownership, because to change it now would harm more people than it could ever help. You can't right every historical wrong. I have a native American background, in part. I don't believe for a moment that we could give reparations to the Indians, or to the descendants of slaves, without absolutely raping current-day property owners in the process. So I oppose 'fixing' this perceived problem (that deprives nobody of a natural right and ergo isn't a proper problem for government to solve in the first place because it isn't about life, liberty, or property) for the same conceptual reasons that I would oppose selling all our public lands, giving reparations to the descendants of slaves, sending descendants of slaves back to Africa, returning ancestral lands to the Indians, or forcing the Cherokee of Oklahoma to move back to Georgia. Any of those things just opens a Pandora's box of human rights violations, and only time would allow us to list them all. I'd rather just live without knowing what trouble such actions might cause.

So, as much as it lies within me, I will oppose fixing any historical problem , through the expansion of any government power, if said problem does not deprive an existing human being of an actual natural right. To offer a parallel, I think government-sponsored historical monuments are stupid and wasteful and usually the result of ego or idolatry. I'd never fund Mt. Rushmore and wasn't impressed when I saw it last year. But I am, for the same conceptual reasons, vehemently opposed to the destruction of monuments. Taking them down just makes things worse. Historically, cultures that remove monuments descend into hell on earth shortly afterwards for reasons that weren't obvious up front. Even if the monuments were 'bad' by the prevailing political zeitgeist.

And in the very next breath, I'll defend the text of the 5th Amendment because any attempt to 'fix' even what I freely see as a problem, would just make things worse. Leave the text, recognize its weakness, and fight against its use to grow government, at every step of the way, and I do mean every step of the way, including this one. Leave history alone. Leave the Constitution alone, leave federal land ownership alone, leave monuments alone, leave Indian reservations alone, leave former slave owners alone. Touch any of it and you open Pandora's box.

That was a really well worded response. I appreciate your point of view and I can’t argue with it. You've backed up your views very well.

If I had to declare a winner of the thread it’s you sir.

That was a mic drop post.

No expansion of power is necessary and none would be created.   Governments (State and Federal) can force easements or use eminent domain to unlock lands from capture.   It has never been otherwise.  So don't act like this is some sweeping, unprecedented infringement on the right of property.   It isn't.

There is no "crisis" but it is now an issue that more people care about as more people can travel and would otherwise be able to access these public lands... if not for the "muh grandpappy's airspace" excuse to preserve these little hunting fiefs.

Don't act shocked when 9 out of 10 people fail to be swayed by "muh airspace."

Except when you shoot a drone.

FIFY

Hey now,  be careful our he will mark you as a communist. His rights to exclusively use public land for profit outweighs everyone else's use of it at all.