03/03/2025
“The Last Stand for Liberty: How Farmers and Landowners Must Defend Their Air Rights from the FAA’s Takeover”
The Consultant GMJoe™, By Joe Cozart
The decline of a republic does not come with a grand declaration or the march of foreign armies at its gates. It comes, rather, in the slow, patient erosion of liberty, always in the name of something righteous, always with the promise of safety, until one day the people find themselves imprisoned not by foreign conquerors, but by their own well-intentioned cowardice. Benjamin Franklin, ever the realist, understood this in ways that those who govern today, with their polished sophistry and omnipresent bureaucratic machinery, either fail to grasp or, more likely, understand all too well.
It is a quaint notion now, that liberty was ever the American birthright. The founders, those cautious and skeptical men, knew it was not. They knew, rather, that it was an inheritance, fragile and constantly imperiled, not to be hoarded but fought for, cultivated, renewed. It was not security they sought, but freedom. For they knew that security, that illusion peddled by governments as a balm for the uneasy, is nothing more than the polite word for control. A government does not secure a people; it subjugates them, first through necessity, then through convenience, and finally through habit.
How easy it is, after all, to persuade the citizenry to relinquish their rights when dressed in the language of public good. How quickly does the cry of “protect us” lead to the silent acquiescence of those who once believed themselves free? The American people have been trained to fear, to obey, to accept restrictions upon their speech, their movement, their very thoughts, all under the benign phraseology of “national interest” or “public safety.” Once, they might have balked at the idea of an all-seeing state apparatus monitoring their every utterance, but now they accept it as one might accept the weather, a condition to be endured, not resisted.
It would have been unthinkable to those early revolutionaries that the people of their imagined republic would one day welcome the same oppression they had fought to overthrow. But here we are, a nation policed by its own paranoia, convinced that safety is the highest good, that freedom is negotiable. One wonders if Franklin, in his wry and skeptical manner, would even bother to repeat his warning now. Would he find an audience willing to listen, or merely a population trained to regard him as an old fool, out of step with the modern necessity of submission?
There is no tyranny so complete as that which cloaks itself in the language of protection. No government has ever surrendered power willingly once it has claimed it under the guise of safeguarding its people. It does not matter if the threat is war, or crime, or disease, or even the vague specter of “misinformation.” The formula remains the same: a frightened populace, a government all too willing to offer its outstretched hand, and a gradual, almost imperceptible dissolution of that once-vaunted liberty.
And so, the American people go on, trading their essential liberties not even for actual security, but for the mere promise of it, a bargain made again and again with the ever-expanding state. They do not even seem to notice that the trade is always one-sided, that the safety is always conditional, that the liberties once given away never return. Perhaps they no longer care. Perhaps they have become comfortable in their submission, reassured by the lullabies of their leaders that all of this—this surveillance, this censorship, this quiet erosion of rights—is for their own good.
It is not, of course. It never has been. It never will be. But a people who would trade liberty for the mere suggestion of security deserve neither. And soon enough, they will have neither.
Liberty, that most unruly and inconvenient of virtues, has never been in fashion among those who would govern. It is, after all, a condition that denies them their natural inclination to rule unchecked, to legislate without resistance, to preside over a docile population that accepts its condition with a bovine compliance. And yet, liberty remains the only force capable of tempering the inevitable excesses of power. Without it, there is no security—only a fragile, conditional peace dictated by those who hold the keys to the cages.
The American experiment was predicated upon the idea that liberty was not granted by the state but rather that it preexisted the state. A revolutionary thought at the time and one that, if entertained seriously today, would send our respectable commentators and professional managers of public opinion into fits of nervous perspiration. The modern American does not see himself as a free individual but as a subject, dependent upon his government for his rights, his security, his daily permissions. He waits, glassy-eyed, for the pronouncements of his betters, eager to know what new restrictions he must embrace, what new sacrifice he must make for the common good, what liberty he must now surrender in exchange for the illusion of protection.
For illusion it is. Security, as promised by governments, is not security at all but the ever-tightening grip of control. The real security of a nation, of a people, comes not from its surveillance networks or its secret courts or its militarized police forces but from the very thing those in power most despise: a free and self-reliant citizenry. But such a people are difficult to govern. They ask too many questions. They resist encroachments on their autonomy. They refuse to be frightened into submission by whatever the panic of the week might be—be it foreign terrorists or economic collapse or a virus that, like all things in nature, serves primarily as a pretext for government expansion.
Liberty is the foundation of real security, for a free people are not easily controlled, nor are they easily cowed. They do not require permission to speak their minds, to arm themselves against threats both foreign and domestic, to challenge the legitimacy of those who would rule them. They are not infantilized wards of the state, waiting to be told what they may and may not do. They understand, as Franklin understood, that a people who willingly submit to authoritarian measures in the hope of being kept safe will soon find that they are neither safe nor free.
And yet, today, we are told that we must choose: that we must accept a tradeoff, that to be secure, we must tolerate the slow suffocation of liberty, the incremental surrender of our right to dissent, to live unobserved, to govern our own affairs without the benevolent interference of the state. This is, of course, a lie. Liberty does not weaken a nation; it is the only thing that makes a nation strong. A state that relies on coercion, on secrecy, on the suspension of constitutional rights in order to function is not strong—it is a prisoner of its own fear, a faltering empire that, like so many before it, mistakes the machinery of oppression for the structure of civilization.
The choice before us is not between security and liberty, as we are so often told, but between a life lived in fear, begging for protection, and a life lived freely, taking the risks that freedom demands. One path leads to a society in which individuals are responsible for themselves, their families, their communities—where security is derived not from a watchful and omnipotent state but from the strength and resilience of a self-sufficient people. The other leads to a world in which citizens are mere subjects, monitored and managed, their every action scrutinized, their rights conditional, their lives dictated by those who claim to know what is best for them.
And so the question is not whether liberty is worth the risk. The question is whether a life without liberty is worth living at all. If history is any guide—and it always is—those who relinquish their freedom for the promise of security will find that they have not only lost both but have done so with a whimper, convinced all the while that their servitude was necessary, even just. It is a bitter fate, but one well-deserved by those who have forgotten what it means to be free.
In the grand and ever-expanding theater of government control, one of the more insidious performances currently unfolding is the attempt to redefine the very air we breathe as the property of the state. It is a bold move, even by the standards of bureaucratic ambition. Where once the land was considered the sovereign domain of its owner, stretching upward into the skies above, we are now being asked—no, told—that those rights no longer exist in any meaningful way. Enter Vantis and the grand designs of the Federal Aviation Administration, a pairing that serves as yet another chapter in the slow but determined march toward centralized control over every aspect of life, all in the name of efficiency, innovation, and, of course, safety.
Let us be clear: the issue at hand is not merely one of aviation policy or technological advancement. It is not about drones, or industry, or even national security. It is about the fundamental question of whether private property, and by extension the rights of the individual, still holds any weight against the insatiable hunger of the state. The answer, if one listens to the murmurs of our regulatory overlords, is increasingly evident. In their view, airspace belongs not to the people who own the land beneath it, but to those who regulate it. What was once an accepted principle—that a landowner controls the airspace above his property—is now being rewritten under the auspices of progress.
The vehicle for this quiet seizure of rights is the Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) system, a technological marvel that, when stripped of its corporate gloss, is nothing more than a tool for control. Vantis, North Dakota’s statewide drone network, is being held up as the model for this transition, a fully integrated system in which unmanned aircraft can traverse the state under a single, centralized oversight mechanism. And who, you may ask, will control this system? Not the farmers over whose fields these drones will fly. Not the property owners who might prefer that their land remain free from the unblinking eye of airborne surveillance. No, the control will reside in the hands of those who have positioned themselves as the gatekeepers of the sky—government agencies, corporate interests, and those ever-eager middlemen of technological progress who see no conflict in dismantling liberty if it results in a contract and a press release.
The brilliance of the scheme is that it is presented as inevitable. Resistance is cast as backward-looking, anti-technology, even unpatriotic. Who, after all, would stand in the way of progress? Of efficiency? Of the great promise of an interconnected, automated, endlessly monitored future? And yet, beneath the rhetoric, the reality is as old as power itself: what is being taken is control, what is being sacrificed is sovereignty, and what is being sold is the illusion that such trade-offs are necessary for advancement.
The FAA, with its customary disdain for state authority and private ownership, has made clear that it intends to be the arbiter of this new order. The states, once believed to have dominion over their own skies, are being informed that their role is to comply, not to govern. The notion that air rights belong to the people who own the land beneath them is being treated as an anachronism, something quaint and impractical in the face of the modern world’s demands. And so, step by step, without a single shot fired or a single law debated in any meaningful forum, the rights of landowners are being dissolved into a nebulous framework of federal oversight and corporate partnership.
What Franklin understood, and what we seem determined to forget, is that liberty is lost not in grand moments of conquest, but in the slow, deliberate erosion of control over one’s own life and property. The FAA, Vantis, and their many counterparts across the country are not offering security, nor are they offering progress in any sense that benefits the average citizen. They are offering a bargain: your rights in exchange for their control, your sovereignty in exchange for their management. It is a bargain that no free people should ever accept, and yet, in the numbing glow of technological advancement, we seem prepared to do just that.
So here we stand, watching as the air itself is confiscated by those who claim to know best, as another frontier of liberty is fenced off and handed over to the ever-expanding bureaucracy of the modern state. The question remains whether the people—the landowners, the farmers, the citizens of states long believed to have their own say in such matters—will accept this quiet annexation or whether they will remember that liberty, once surrendered, is not easily regained. If history is any indication, the bureaucrats are betting on the former. But then again, history also reminds us that the appetite of the state is never sated, and that those who give up their rights today will find that there is always another demand, always another sacrifice to be made in the name of progress, safety, and the ever-elusive promise of security.
The final insult, of course, is that the bureaucrats and their corporate benefactors no longer feel the need to cloak their ambitions in even the thinnest veneer of legality. Where once such seizures of rights were at least accompanied by the necessary fictions—talk of fairness, compromise, the delicate balance between progress and property—now, the mask has slipped entirely. Some of the very architects of Vantis, alongside their ever-compliant allies in the statehouse, declare openly, without a trace of irony, that landowners have no air rights. None. That the space above their homes, their fields, their businesses, does not belong to them at all, but to the great regulatory ether, where all things are administered, parceled out, and, when convenient, taken away.
This is the final triumph of the administrative state: not merely the theft of liberty, but the erasure of the idea that it ever existed in the first place. For years, Americans were at least afforded the courtesy of being deceived—told that their rights were respected, that they could appeal, that the Constitution still had some bearing on the machinations of power. But now, there is no need for such illusions. The government simply declares, with the assurance of a ruler addressing his subjects, that air rights no longer belong to the people. It is a breathtaking act of audacity, made all the more grotesque by the fact that, outside a few scattered voices of protest, the people—docile, trained, numbed by decades of conditioning—seem willing to accept it.
Let us consider, for a moment, the implications of such a doctrine. If a landowner has no right to the air above his own property, what else does he not own? Does he own his land at all, or is that too merely a temporary arrangement, contingent upon the whims of those who administer the drone corridors and the data streams? When a machine passes over his fields, scanning, surveilling, extracting—who, precisely, benefits from that flight? Not the farmer, who neither permitted nor profits from this intrusion. Not the citizen, whose autonomy is reduced with each passing moment. No, the benefits flow in one direction, and one direction only—to the consolidators of power, to those who claim dominion over the air, to the administrators and regulators and policymakers who, in their infinite wisdom, have decided that property is no longer property, that ownership is no longer ownership, that what once belonged to the people now belongs to the state.
And let us not forget the corporations—those ever-dutiful partners of government, those loyal allies of centralization, whose interest in liberty is, at best, theoretical. It is not difficult to see where this is headed. The airspace, now declared the domain of the state, will not remain neutral territory. It will be auctioned off, leased, distributed to those who have the right credentials, the right connections, the right contributions to the right campaigns. Vantis, the FAA, the entire infrastructure of control being erected under the guise of progress, will not serve the people—it will serve the few, the managers, the controllers, the silent arbiters of what is and is not permitted.
It is not that this is unprecedented. Governments have always sought to extract, to regulate, to consolidate. But what makes this moment particularly insidious is the sheer, unwavering confidence with which they declare their right to do so. The great inconvenience of the Constitution, the stubbornness of private property, the once-unquestioned principle that a man controlled what was his—these are now regarded as quaint relics, irrelevant in an era where security, technology, and efficiency have replaced liberty as the state’s highest ideals.
If Franklin’s warning has not yet been fully realized, it soon will be. The American people have been conditioned to believe that freedom is not something to be exercised but something to be permitted. And so, when told that they do not own the air above them, that they have no right to refuse the silent, mechanical presence of those who monitor and map and measure their lives, they will likely accept it. Because they have been told it is necessary. Because they have been told it is inevitable. Because they have been taught, over generations, that resistance is both futile and, more to the point, unnecessary—that if they simply comply, if they simply obey, the world will remain orderly and just.
But order, as history reminds us, is merely a prelude to subjugation. If they take the air today, they will take the land tomorrow. And then, they will take whatever else remains. This is the lesson of empire, and though the American people may pretend otherwise, they are now subjects of an empire all their own—an empire not of flags and armies, but of regulations, networks, and the quiet, relentless dissolution of the rights they once believed to be theirs.
The modern imperial state, in all its efficiency, rarely operates with a single, visible fist. That would be crude, unsubtle, an admission of its own authoritarian nature. No, power in our era is far more refined, far more insidious. It does not seize; it “partners.” It does not dictate; it “collaborates.” And nowhere is this delicate illusion of benevolence more perfectly constructed than in the great industrial-academic complex—the universities, the research institutions, the gleaming innovation hubs that, while masquerading as centers of learning and progress, serve primarily as the ideological laundromats of corporate and governmental control.
Enter the University of North Dakota, a shining example of how this machine operates. To the untrained eye, UND appears to be merely an academic institution, a proud Midwestern university helping to usher in the future of aviation. But to those who care to look beyond the press releases and the staged photographs of grinning faculty in lab coats, the reality is far less noble. The university functions not as an impartial entity, not as a place where ideas are debated and knowledge is pursued for its own sake, but as a legitimizing arm of the very system that seeks to strip landowners of their sovereignty.
Vantis, the FAA’s encroachment on state and private air rights, and the grand experiment in centralized drone control—these things do not arrive under the banner of federal power alone. That would provoke resistance. No, they are introduced gently, carefully, under the watchful guidance of the academic elite, wrapped in the comforting language of research and innovation. And so, when the farmers of North Dakota are told that the skies above their land are no longer theirs, it is not a government official who tells them, but a friendly university spokesperson, a trusted institution assuring them that this is all for the best.
The university provides cover, lending an air of scientific legitimacy to what is, at its core, an act of outright appropriation. The landowners are not to think of this as a violation of their rights but as a grand technological advancement, a noble collaboration between academia, industry, and government. Never mind that the end result is the same: their property is no longer their own, their skies are no longer theirs to control.
Of course, the faculty and administrators at these institutions are not ignorant of their role in this process. Some are true believers, eager to participate in what they see as the inevitable march of progress. Others are merely opportunists, happy to take the funding, the grants, the prestige that comes with aligning themselves with power. Few, if any, will ask the simple question: What right do we have? What right do we have to redefine the very concept of property? What right do we have to declare that a farmer, whose family has owned the land for generations, no longer has the authority to decide who or what flies over it?
But such questions are, of course, unwelcome. They are inconvenient. They suggest that the university, far from being a neutral institution of learning, is in fact a willing accomplice in the systematic redefinition of ownership itself.
And so, the great charade continues. The FAA, with its regulatory muscle, sets the agenda. The corporations, ever hungry for monopolistic control over the skies, provide the funding and the lobbying muscle. And the universities, ever desperate for relevance and financial backing, provide the intellectual justification, the scientific gloss, the comforting assurance that all of this is natural, inevitable, even beneficial.
Meanwhile, the farmers, the landowners, the actual people whose rights are being stripped away, are left with nothing but a series of polite assurances from men in suits and academics in pressed slacks that this is simply the future, that resistance is futile, that progress demands their quiet surrender.
And so the slow theft continues, sanctioned not by force, but by the quiet, patient bureaucracy of the modern state, masked behind the smiling faces of academics who, in their eagerness to serve progress, have instead become its most useful instruments of control.
And so, as always, it is the farmers, the growers, the ranchers—the very people who built this country and who sustain it still—who are left to bear the cost of this grand experiment in control. While the bureaucrats congratulate themselves in their windowless offices, while the university elites bask in the glow of federal grant money, while the corporations position themselves for monopoly over the new frontier of automated surveillance, it is the landowners who find themselves, once again, at the mercy of forces they neither invited nor agreed to.
This is how the republic falls—not with a declaration, not with an army marching through the streets, but with a quiet, patient erosion of liberty, disguised as progress, masked as security. The farmer does not wake up one morning to find a new law on his doorstep stating that he no longer controls the air above his land. Instead, he finds that, piece by piece, through a web of policies, partnerships, and administrative rulings, his rights have simply been reassigned, transferred from his hands to the faceless mechanisms of power. The air above his land is no longer his, not because it was stolen outright, but because a consortium of regulators, academics, and corporate executives decided it should be so.
And what is he to do? He is told that drones will now pass over his land at all hours, that surveillance is now an inevitability, that his rights—once considered sacred—have been rendered irrelevant by the great march of technological necessity. He is given no compensation, no voice in the matter, no recourse. He is, in effect, a tenant on his own land, watching as decisions that should be his are made by people who have never stepped foot on a farm, who have never worked the land, who see him as nothing more than an inconvenient relic of an outdated era.
This is the true cost of security. Not safety. Not stability. But the slow and methodical dissolution of self-governance, the quiet transfer of power away from the individual and toward the institutions that have made it their mission to manage, to regulate, to dictate. The farmers, the landowners, the people who still believe in the simple idea that what is theirs belongs to them, are now the last barrier standing between a free society and one in which all things—land, air, property, privacy—are simply commodities to be managed by the state and its corporate allies.
They suffer not just from the loss of air rights, but from the greater betrayal of a nation that once prided itself on property rights as the foundation of liberty. They suffer not just from the encroachment of drones and surveillance, but from the deeper knowledge that their rights were not taken from them by invaders, but by their own government, by institutions that once pretended to serve them, by leaders who now tell them, openly and without shame, that they have no say in the matter.
And if they fall—if they are made to accept this, to live under it, to submit—then what remains? If the people who have worked the land, who have held fast to their independence, who have sustained this country since its birth, can be made to surrender their rights under the pretense of security, then what right does anyone else have to claim that they are free?
It is always the same story, told in different ways but with the same ending: power expands, liberty recedes, and the people are told it is all for their own good. But history is unkind to those who believe such things. And if the farmers, the ranchers, the landowners of this country do not stand now—if they do not reclaim the air, the land, the rights that have always been theirs—then they will soon find that there is nothing left to reclaim.
And here lies the final insult, the last and most obvious fraud of the entire operation: that the regulation of drone air rights—if regulation is truly necessary—should fall not under the FAA, that bloated and self-important arm of the aviation bureaucracy, but under the Department of Transportation, just as commercial trucking is managed. For what are these drones if not, at their core, automated freight movers, a new class of transport vehicle designed to carry goods, data, and surveillance payloads across a nation that, until now, at least pretended to respect the boundaries of private property?
The FAA, of course, sees things differently. To them, drones are not simply vehicles; they are the extension of a monopolistic airspace regime, one in which all things that leave the ground—whether a crop-dusting UAV, a package carrier, or a child’s toy—fall under their ever-expanding dominion. This is not about safety, nor about efficiency, nor about any of the convenient excuses they offer in their polished policy papers. It is about control.
The Department of Transportation, by contrast, already manages the flow of commerce, the rules of the road, the balance between state and federal interests. Were drone corridors to be governed as commercial trucking is—subject to reasonable regulation but ultimately managed with respect to private land and state authority—the matter of air rights would be far less contentious. A landowner does not forfeit the right to his property simply because an interstate highway runs past his fields; nor should he lose his air rights because a drone corridor has been declared above his head. But the FAA has no interest in such balance. It is an agency that thrives on control, on the ever-expanding scope of its dominion, on the convenient lie that the moment something rises above the ground, it is no longer the concern of those who own the land below.
The farmers, the ranchers, the private citizens who still believe in property rights should recognize this distinction and demand it be corrected. The FAA, with its obsession for airspace as a federalized domain, has no business dictating the movement of drones over private land any more than it dictates the movement of semi-trucks down county roads. The states must reclaim their rightful authority in this matter, asserting that just as highways are state-managed arteries of commerce, so too should drone corridors fall under state and local governance, with landowners having a say in what is permitted over their property.
But to do this requires resistance, something the FAA and its partners at Vantis are betting will not materialize. They are counting on the docility of the American landowner, on the steady erosion of his will, on his belief that the government will always win in the end. But history is full of miscalculations made by those who believed that power, once taken, is never challenged.
If there is any lesson to be learned from Franklin, from the founders, from every man who has ever defended his home against those who would claim dominion over it, it is this: liberty is only lost when it is surrendered. The air belongs to those who own the land beneath it, and no bureaucrat, no agency, no university grant can change that fundamental truth. The moment we accept otherwise is the moment we cease to be free.
By Joe Cozart, The Consultant, GMJoe™ Consulting ©2025 All Rights Reserved
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