Socialism

Government ownership of western land creates conflicts like the one in Oregon.

"As a Plan B, the feds began to encourage the use of "open range" and the idea of public lands in which large numbers of small landowners would share water and grazing resources.
Eventually, neither the government nor the settlers wanted these lands to be privatized. Each interest group — homesteaders, ranchers, and water owners — wanted the lands to continue to be public since each group assumed it would be able to use its own political power to gain de facto use and control of the lands." 

The ranchers don't want to buy it.

"However, it should be remembered that, generally speaking, ranchers who use federal lands have never been opposed to the existence of federal lands. After all, federal subsidization of water projects and federal control of watersheds has furnished ranchers with cheap water for years, at the expense of taxpayers and urban dwellers. In dry and high-altitude areas especially, cattle are reliant on alfalfa crops and on other non-forage feed, which means their need for water is immense."

Privilege.

"The perennial conflicts in the West over land seizures by environmentalists, regulatory battles, micromanagement, and overgrazing all illustrate how much of a failure the federal land ownership scheme has been.
With control over such immense resources, the far away federal government does not respond to local needs or local demand, but to national interest groups. " 

Politics, not economics.