July 26, 2017 at 5:16 p.m.
It's just another day
It's just another day
That's right. Thanks to two liberal downstate politicians, the state government has come into our county and gobbled up another 1,000 acres, this time from American Timberland. That's another thousand acres - 958 to be exact - removed from the tax rolls, likely forever.
That's another thousand acres that will never be developed, in a region in desperate need of development.
Oh sure, the bureaucrats and their political lapdogs will have you believe this is all in the public interest. This purchase will block in and preserve precious timberland for generations, they say, saving logging jobs. And it will create revenue for the state's colleges and libraries.
Baloney.
Perhaps the land will preserve timberland for now, but how do we know how the state will choose to manage it in future years? And who are Brad Schimel and Doug La Follette to make those economic development decisions for the people of the Northwoods?
According to agency bureaucrat Jonathan Barry, American Timberland was going to carve up the land and sell it in parcels if the government didn't buy it. To which we say, good for them, if that's what they wanted to do, and so what if they did?
The truth is, without Schimel and La Follette and thus taxpayers as their sugar daddies, American Timberland would have to have a private-sector buyer of that land to sell it, and that buyer would almost certainly have an economic reason to buy it. Otherwise, the status quo would remain.
We would have much preferred the land's future to be decided by the broad market than by two big-government planners, for in virtually every case one can cite, the invisible hand of the market makes better economic decisions than the blind eyes and empty heads of government bureaucrats and patsy politicians.
For those who believe government can better direct the economy than the private sector, just look at Obamacare and the disastrous effects it has had on the broad economy, small businesses, and health-care markets. And what about Obama's trillion-dollar job-creation stimulus that drove labor force participation to its lowest levels since World War II?
What about the U.S. Postal Service, and its billions of dollars of debt when private carriers are making steady profits? While the post office lost $5.6 billion in 2016 alone, FedEx just reported record quarterly and full-year earnings for its just ended fiscal year.
To be sure, we care about the timber industry in the Northwoods, but we don't believe that the industry's long-term survival and health will benefit by placing more timberland - and economic decisions - in government hands. And we don't believe the economy in Wisconsin will improve by placing more land in government portfolios, period.
After all, it's the private sector that drives the economy, not the government. It may well be that the highest and best use of that land is timber, and it may not be, but somehow we don't think God revealed the true answer to Schimel and La Follette before the vote.
Just who do they think they are to believe they know best about the use of land in Oneida County?
Well, La Follette is a knee-jerk liberal, so that's all you need to know about him.
And then there's Schimel, who is a big-government Republican crony if ever there was one. No one should ever call this man a conservative or a defender of property rights, or of civil rights, for that matter.
In fact, he has spent the past few weeks - when he wasn't planning to increase the land holdings of government at the expense of the private sector - bragging about how he and his agency squashed the property rights of the Murr family in St. Croix.
In that case, Schimel got the U.S. Supreme Court to buy into the argument that government, by the wave of a magic ordinance, can take a legally delineated parcel and declare that, for purposes of resale, the property's owner must merge it with a contiguous lot.
The ordinances in question would not allow the Murrs to develop a substandard lot because they owned the contiguous lot - it could be developed under grandfathering if anybody else owned it - and required them to merge the lot with the one next door if they wanted to sell it.
So the Murrs, by government fiat, could not build on the lot or sell it by itself, and Brad Schimel somehow argued that that was not a government taking. Indeed, he called it a victory for "the rule of law in Wisconsin," rather then the defeat for constitutional property rights that it was.
Seriously, this guy is a Republican?
Of course, the attorney general has compiled a horrible record on open government, fighting to keep training videos secret and redacting names from disciplinary records, while using his office of "open government" to actually delay responses to open-records requests.
And then there's civil asset forfeiture, the mechanism government uses to seize the property of citizens before they are convicted and sometimes even before they are charged with any crime.
Within the state and nationally, conservatives have campaigned to reform that process to protect citizens' assets from an out-of-control government, but Brad Schimel has fought the reform movement every step of the way, lollipopping and lap dancing for law-enforcement agencies eager to protect their sweet bounties.
So wave the red flag, check your wallet, and hide your assets when this man steps into your county, as he just did.
Just as Schimel supports the government robbery of citizens through civil asset forfeiture, so he supports the robbery of citizens through government land grabs.
The bottom line is, Adamczyk is right that the state constitution established the board of commissioners to sell all the lands it holds and to manage the proceeds - not the lands - for its educational beneficiaries. That they should do.
Yes, the constitution allows withholding those sales when it is expedient to do so, when market values are low, but over the years the BCPL has made a mockery of that provision by holding the lands expediently forever.
And, yes, the BCPL land bank authority allows the agency to buy lands, but that doesn't mean that law is constitutional, and in fact legislative council questioned its constitutionality when the law was considered.
Everybody ignored the concerns, and the law has never been tested in court. We're betting Brad Schimel won't question it.
In the end, the BCPL today, controlled as it is by a big-government liberal and a big-government Republican, is no better than when it was controlled by the radical environmentalist Tia Nelson.
That's a big disappointment, given the conservative turn of the state's electorate in recent elections.
But it's not surprising. For decades, the establishments of both parties have ruled and overruled the public will at will.
Tuesday was just another day in the life of big government.
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