This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, February 26, 2016. I'm Caleb Brown.

Land use fights like the one that led a group of people to occupy an Oregon wildlife area

may be inevitable, at least as long as regulators treat public lands as merely playgrounds

for the wealthy.

Randall O'Toole, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, explains.

The Malhear Wildlife Refuge is a large bird refuge in southeastern Oregon and the federal government has acquired many private

ranches to add to the refuge but one rancher Dwight Hammond refused to sell

to the federal government he had 16,000 acres of land and he was fairly hostile to the federal

government and ran into a number of conflicts over water rights, over grazing rights, over a number of other things.

And a standard practice on both federal and private land

is to do prescribed burning, to improve the productivity of the land and he did some prescribed

fires that unfortunately lapped over on the federal land a few acres.

One of them burned 139 acres. He himself, he and his family

suppressed that fire on federal land. The other one burned only one acre on

federal land. The federal government, partly out of spite for his refusal to sell the family lands to the federal government,

charged him with arson and under federal law that's a minimum five-year sentence. So he and his son Stephen were both

sentenced to jail for five, present for five years. Originally the Oregon

judge doing the sentencing said that was cruel and unusual and he only

sentenced Dwight Hammond to three months and his son Stephen for a year.

But the federal government came in and insisted that they be sentenced for the full five years and they are now in prison for serving that sentence.

On the day they went to prison, which was just before New Year's, The number of ranchers from states around Oregon came to do a

protest and at the end of the protest some of them went and took over a then

...