Luis that is my recollection both here and for TOS.
I respect your opinions as well and will always try to maintain the civil nature of our discourse.
In an effort to get this thread back on it's original course, I would invite you to look at how states formed out of the land acquired by the fed gov with the Louisiana Purchase vs those states in the west have been treated with regard to lands within their boundaries.
Ran across the article below after I posted the above and thought it relevant.
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865601377/Western-states-to-feds-Turn-over-public-lands.html
I get that, however, the US Constitution is clear on what constitutes State powers:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.The Constitution gives the power over the management of lands held in the public trust to the United States, and it
does not prohibit the States from turning ownership of any portion of its territory over to the United States. The case would then have to be made that the drafters of the Nevada Constitution entered onto that agreement against their free will, which would be extremely difficult to prove at this point in time due to the serious lack of witnesses to the negotiations.
So, let's imagine for a minute that this clause in the Nevada Constitution could in fact be overturned... the existence of the State itself would be in jeopardy, land sales by the United States in the last 150 years would (theoretically) be null and void, and the cost of the management of the lands in question would become the sole responsibility of the State of Nevada and its tax base.
I read somewhere that the cost of the management program is substantially higher than the worth of the fees received, so the program itself is heavily subsidized by the United States. That would become Nevada's nut to crack since Federal subsidies would be gone.
The land could be privatized, but i don't know that Cliven Bundy has the means to purchase 750,000 to use as grazing land for his cattle, so the land itself would be purchased by people of more significant means who would then have every right to charge whatever price they see fit for use of the land.
IIRC, Bundy is supposed to be paying somewhere below $2/month per cow/calf combination, while the average grazing fee on private land in the West is $16.80 a month, according to the
Congressional Research Service, and ranges between $2.28 and $150 on state lands in the region.
If $2/month per cow/calf combination to pay the Feds can break a Nevada rancher, I don't know that the alternative is really a good idea.