Jeff Duncan: “we can never satisfy government's appetite for money or land. If we gave every department or agency up here twice what…”

“we can never satisfy government's appetite for money or land. If we gave every department or agency up here twice what they are getting now, they would be happy for a short time but then they would be coming back to us crying about a shortfall in funding. But it is this threat to land and to private property that especially concerns me tonight. The Federal Government today owns over 30 percent of the land in this country, and State and local governments and quasi-governmental agencies own another 20 percent. So that half the land today is in some type of public control. The alarming thing is the rapid rate at which that government control of land has been increasing in the last 30 or 40 years. Then on top of that, we continue to put more and more restrictions on what people can do with the private property that remains in their hands. We have to realize at some point, Mr. Speaker, that private property is one of the few things that has set us apart from countries like the former Soviet Union and Cuba and other socialist and communist nations. We need to recognize that private property is a very, very important part of our freedom and our prosperity. I have talked about these restrictions on what people can do with their land. There are groups all over the country that protest any time anybody wants to dig for coal, drill for any oil, cut any trees, or produce any natural gas.”