Quote:
Originally Posted by Sharpshooter
I read this post a couple of times and I thought about it a little bit. I have this to say as a thought for everyone. We are in a unique position in this nation that our fore bearers were not in. They had many more options available to them than we do. First of all you could homestead, I don't even think that is possible in Alaska nowadays as they stopped the practice a few years back. Secondly even after the passage of the income tax in 1914 we still had people who did not pay taxes to the government and yet they owned their land and could work it and prosper.
Our options today are vastly more limited, if you go and try to live on BLM land and squat for too long they will run you off or arrest you, no option to homestead. If you buy a piece of property no matter how remote you will pay at least property taxes or they will put a lien on it and evict you no matter how far out you live. If you have no job with taxable income then the IRS is going to say your subsistence activities are in fact a job and try to tax the produce of your labors such as trapping and hunting.
In fact other than Alaska there is no place in the union where it is legal any longer to subsistence hunt or fish. Try that where I live you will be fined and then jailed if they catch you doing it more than once or twice and I live in one of the more "Free states" left in the union. These people on that show have bills because we don't live in a free society any longer. In fact with property tax which is only slightly less onerous than income tax you are at best never the owner of your land. Merely a lease tenant.
Even if you live like these blokes on TV the best you can ever hope to be is a mere shadow of what someone who lived 75 to 150 years was. Yes we have cars , jets, the Internet and what essentially amounts to a whole society that has been permanently indentured to the government from the time we are old enough to earn a paycheck till the day we die in front of the TV.
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Good Post. Sad and true. Reading that really made me feel trapped. you COULD go 'off the grid' and try homesteading, but like you said, if they catch you, you're arrested or thrown off the land, etc.