by: Darol Dickinson

During the Tang Dynasty (A.D. 618-907), the most dastardly enemies of Imperial China suffered a process of slow torture and eventual death. It was a punishment that shoots fear up the spine even today, more than a thousand years later.

In world history, few methods of execution were as gruesome as the “Lingchi”—better known as Death by 1000 Cuts. For those who have never been hanged, electrocuted, or shot by firing squad, the Lingchi should be your last choice of a way to die. Its details evolved into an art form that allowed the victim always to die eventually, but slowly. The worse the crime, the longer the torture. The Lingchi’s success in each case was evaluated by how long the punishment could be stretched out. This process was used by the government as a public spectacle to instill fear. It was famous worldwide as a show of power, extreme severity, and Imperial Chinese savagery.

Slightly different but like the methods of the Lingchi is President Biden’s 2024 State of the Union Address. It includes a proposed budget of $7.3 trillion for fiscal 2025, with a categorical 25% tax on billionaires. (Billionaires are the ones who own businesses and hire the most employees.) Like Lingchi, this budget proposal is not designed for a quick, bloody death, but rather a slow sucking away of private assets. Its unstated goal is to equalize outcomes across the entire US population. That is a mission that makes individuals’ prosperity less likely and their survival under government stabulation ever harder.

Overtly, this $7.3 trillion budget includes a plan to sequester millions of acres of productive land for “the greater good.” Buried in it, however, is a covert scheme to take land away from private enterprise and “protect”—that is, remove—it from farm/food production and oil and mineral exploration. This confiscatory plan is an open secret, because the public has already been forewarned.

When Joe Biden was inaugurated in 2021, he immediately announced a 30×30 project to take 30% of US land from private enterprise by 2030 and retire it—i.e., make it dormant—ostensibly for “the greater good.” Soon after that, he announced his 50×50 plan, and then a grand, even-larger 70×70 plan.

To visualize the government plan. Consider the dwindling size of remaining land private-ownership with each increasing increment of government land-grab.

These proposals have ominous parallels to the Chinese Lingchi as well as to collectivist politics. Specifically, in the playbook of any communist or other authoritarian takeover, the first step is to control land, then to control production of all goods and services, and finally to control all the people. This method of long-term, covert acquisition is clearly defined in the Communist Manifesto. The strategy is clear to those who do their research.

The following table shows federal land ownership state-by-state in 2018. Today, six short years later, the total includes millions more acres. In January 2024, President Biden announced success in acquiring 24,000,000 acres for his 30×30 program, now renamed “America the Beautiful.” That new name for his initiative is a euphemism—a phrase that sounds more patriotic, sanitary, and benign than a heavy-handed government takeover of 30, 50 or 70% of private property in the USA.

Here are some methods by which national, state, and non-profit owners of US land legally execute Death by 1000 Cuts:

1. Coveted land is normally located near or between other government-owned properties.
2. Purchases are usually made by imminent domain or at market price. Some properties are even bought at prices inflated above appraised value to “persuade” owners who don’t want to sell.
3. Regardless of price, taxes on citizens are typically increased enough to finance land purchases. Some properties are provisionally bought by NGO’s with contracts to hold them until enough tax revenue has been accumulated.
4. With rare exceptions, “protected” land is usually off-limits to agriculture, food production, timber, mining, and oil exploration. “Protected” means that private enterprise is forbidden and thus cannot create jobs, goods, services, income, or profits on government land.
5. Government land is immediately removed from tax rolls. It generates no income that would otherwise be collected from normal taxes on private property.
6. Public services such as roads, law enforcement, and school revenues cannot be funded from tax-sheltered government land. Instead, private citizens’ taxes to pay for these services must be raised to compensate for untaxed government properties.
7. Signs are typically posted to keep the public off government holdings even when they are labeled “public land.”
8. Government-owned timber or grass land is rarely harvested properly. It becomes vulnerable to wildfires. Public dumping is frequently rampant near population centers. Secluded areas are often used for illegal drug deals.
9. For quarterly and other inspections, federal inspectors drive government cars and trucks, which do not pay taxes for licenses or purchase.
10. States cooperate with federal agencies and NGO’s to achieve the Biden administration’s goal of increased government ownership. Because all government assets are fungible, non-taxpaying entities often trade resources for bridge grants, city water systems, and land acreages. Properties can seldom be bought back from the government or non-profits that take land from private ownership.
11. Death by 1000 Cuts engulfs historic private land “for the public good,” effectively killing it for all profitable and productive uses.

Protecting US land for profitable, sustainable use by private citizens is extremely important in a free society. Here are some tips for responsible voters:

1. Elect representatives who pledge to never expand government land or who will vote to preserve land under only the most compelling conditions.
2. Support representatives who pledge to sell government properties back to private owners in a systematic, orderly process for profitable use.
3. Demand taxation of all government properties and vehicles.
4. Explain to government officials how much public ownership actually costs private citizens for law enforcement, schools, roads—and why Death by 1000 Cuts is dead-wrong painful.
5. Be alert to well-meaning bureaucrats who are actually scrambling to earn Biden’s approval by confiscating millions of acres of private property.
6. Quit this tax-payer-torture! The bleeding must stop. Just say no to all new government land acquisitions and start an orderly liquidation of the government waste-land ownership.