Also from National Review:

Cut away the misplaced rhetoric about freedom (spouted mostly by people who wouldn’t know a steer from a heifer), the dangerous over-use of force by federal agents, the ludicrous spectacle of “free-speech zones,” and the situation is simple: Bundy is extracting a valuable use from land that does not belong to him, and is refusing to pay the owner (i.e., the American taxpayer) for that use.

He is a squatter, a right-wing version of the dreadlocked freegan who sets up living quarters in an abandoned building in Brooklyn. If everyone did as Bundy does, the concept of property rights would be diminished.

Testing Bundy’s claim is simple. If he has a right to do what he is doing on public land to which he does not have title, then so should you and I. What would happen if a hundred other people each put a hundred head of cattle on the same property? The grass would run out; every animal would, eventually, starve.

This “tragedy of the commons” — the depletion of resources that occurs when ranching, farming, timbering, or drilling happen on the same public land without a means to restrict and compensate for that access — is something that grazing rules on BLM property are meant to address. And it works pretty well. Most ranchers who lease BLM land pay a per-head fee (this year, $1.35 per animal unit month) and live a life with no armed standoffs.

It’s entirely possible to really believe in property rights, but it means you can’t just mindlessly follow the political herd. You have gain some real maturity of your own.