CDZ Homestead Acts, how to think about them?

[Toronado3800]

...Now I'm not criticizing it in this post, Manifest Destiny, the Genocide of Native Americans, those are other topics to be debated elsewhere. What I'm saying is the Homestead Act and similar Acts were great giant government project involving not just grants of a continent's worth of land but the 2nd largest use of our military of the century.

In other words it was one heck of a big government project and when talking about the good ol days we should think of the 1800's as the century of big government.

It was a time of the government doing what it was designed to do regarding 'immigration' and use of the military. Big government isn't opening up 'public' land for settlement and use - big government is closing off public land to settlement and use. The land was given, true - but it came with the caveat of do or die, not welfare, medicaid and food stamps - safety nets had not yet been woven.

https://www.blm.gov/or/landsrealty/homestead150/files/HomesteadingFactSheet_2012.pdf

The free land was that safety net. But that was not all that came with it. Land Grant colleges, County rural extension agencies, low cost loans for farm equipment. It is the prime example of a big government giveaway.

If you lived that life you'd never call it a 'safety net'...or the land 'free'. You'd call it an opportunity - but success or failure depended on hard work and a measure of good luck with weather and other events beyond your control.

If I'm gathering right, the opportunity would be like the government giving me a couple million dollars to try my hand at farming now. It was dangerous then, but hey, put untrained me in a combine now on a modern farm and its life threatening also lol.