Living off the grid. Legal or illegal?

[Revoltingest]

"Full employment for contractors and local utilities"

Contractors all hate such regulation.
It often makes their lives miserable.

 

[beenherebeforeagain]

Contractors all hate such regulation.
It often makes their lives miserable.

Oh, and I forgot to include the lawyers in that...

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

It was pretty well spoken for back then as well. The US government stole Native land specifically so it could be given away to White colonists. That's one of the reasons why so much US real estate is federally owned or state property.

In Austria for example, most land is privately owned, with the exceptions of national parks and forests (though a significant portion of forests are privately owned as well).

(Borrowing heavily from a few unrelated ideas from Dan Carlin here...)

They say that the United States never recovered from the closing of the frontier.

The United States' self-identity is wrapped up in the idea of it being a "frontier country" of self-reliance and individualism... but it hasn't had a "frontier" - i.e. territory with no settlers - for more than a century. So how do you maintain your national ideology when the basis for that ideology is gone?

IMO, it's like what happened to the samurai: when Japan was in seemingly perpetual war, it was obvious who belonged to the warrior class... but then in long-term peace, how could you demonstrate that you were a warrior? By doubling down on ideological purity and approaching everything with a warrior ethos, even if all you really did every day was a middling civil service job.

I think something similar happened in the US: the myth of the US as a "frontier nation" got so ingrained that when the frontier closed, nativists doubled down on their ideological purity.

... and just as it became a bit ridiculous to apply the principles of bushido to civilian government administration, it's a bit ridiculous apply the principles of 19th century homesteading to living in a place like Cape Coral, Florida... but it persists nonetheless for ideological reasons.