re: #75 Kragar

I never signed a contract so why should I pay my income taxes?
///

All they seem to care about is that an old, white, conservative guy wrapped up in western cowboy tropes of rugged individualism is mad at the government. The fact that he’s trying to get free access to resources he doesn’t own is irrelevant.

The truth is that ranching is a tough business in the modern market, in no small part because people like Bundy go way over their quotas and abuse the grazing lands, which has negative repercussions for the entire industry. The people I know in Montana that still run traditional beef ranches have for years had to supplement their incomes by offering tours and suchlike. It’s hard to believe from a meat loving consumer perspective but the price of meat was for a long time way too low to sustain a healthy ranching industry, and there are built in costs that factor twice.

Some of this is because much of the industry is dependent on the price of corn for feeding stock, and since the ethanol industry too off corn supplies for feed compete with and are slaved to to the price of energy. Then there’s the price of energy itself, which determines a good chunk of how much it costs to transport both the feed to the cattle and the cattle to the market. The modern economy has some reinforcing feedback mechanisms that, once they start to move, hit many smaller operators like a ton of bricks.