Wild West

Had a great time down at the Northwest String Summit... Yonder Mountain String Band threw down approximately nine hours of mind-blowing music over the weekend, extending the genre boundaries of bluegrass every time they get on the stage. The festival had a generally friendly and relaxed atmosphere, I'll have a full review in a few days after I've had time to process the music (read: listen to the shows again).

I was on Google Maps today -as I am sometimes wont to do- looking up directions for upcoming travels, and I zoomed out to the large view of North America. From this angle I noticed that there was a much larger percentage of government-owned land, signified by the color green, in the Western U.S. than in any other part of the country. The non-coastal Western states are generally given a reputation for being much more libertarian than the rest of the country, so it surprised me to see this much governmental involvement. When I found some data on the matter it confirmed my observations: three of the top four most libertarian states have extremely high percentages of federal land ownership, excluding state or locally owned land. Several of these states such as Colorado, Alaska, Utah, and Idaho are counted among the most libertarian, and the real estate in each one of them is at least 35% owned by the federal government. Of course, I understand that there are natural and historical reasons why so much land in the Rockies is federally owned, but it also strikes me that New Hampshire, the top-ranked libertarian state, has about double the federal land that any other Northeastern state (13.4%). It might be a little theatrical to simply yell "hypocrisy," but I think it is an interesting correlation that someone with actual experience in political science and statistics should look into...