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Episode-2055- Fishing From Bar Ditches to Big Water — 12 Comments

  1. Hope you have a great birthday tomorrow Jack. Thank you for all you do and have done to help so many to learn, build new skills, and achieve more Liberty in their own lives. Thank you brother.

    Sean in Florida.

  2. Lol….Got over 20 rods, a boat, an ice shanty, a pier cart and more gear than is really right….but this gal just hasn’t found the right beer.

  3. With respect to this quote: “I am so sick of politics & economics & people being screwed by the state — how about we just talk about fishing today. Yea they make you buy a license to do it but those are pretty cheap right?” — PERSPECTIVE: A fishing license is a prima facie evidence of BigGov over-reach. Please recall this DEFINITION: “A License is government granted permission to do that which is illegal, immoral or a tort.” The fish are claimed property of BigGov & license is designed to thwart your primordial, God given right to forage for a living.

    • I actually don’t have anywhere near the problem with something like a fishing license as I do with say most other taxes.

      First you only pay if you choose to use it. Second many fish regulations don’t apply or frankly are not really enforceable on privately owned waters.

      What I mean is you can and damn well might be cited for hunting deer without a license on your own property. However if you have surface water 100% on your property it is YOURS, you are not going to be cited for fishing there.

      Translation, fishing is mostly done on land that in the days of old would have been called “the commons” something must pay for their management. And some mechanism must prevent over harvest. Can we do that without a state, bet your ass we can, but right now we have one.

      And again it is voluntary, if you don’t want to hunt or fish you are not forced to pay for the management of the game I pursue.

      Also in 1993 I came to Texas and started fishing. That is 24 years, in those 24 years I have never once been asked by a warden to provide my fishing license.

      So I am going to put fish and game management way at the bottom of the list of the State’s evil doings, still evil but sort of like shoving someone to skip a place in line evil, rather than many other evils akin to say burning a barn full of puppies and kittens!

      • I agree to a point….. but it’s ironic how we use licenses to fund the fish and game, so they can pay a game warden to check our licenses. Hmmm.
        Personally, I think it’s my god given right to kill one elk, one deer, one antelope, catch 5 fish a day, and kill game birds without some douche at the capitol telling me I can do it.
        I agree it’s not as agregious as other state nazi tactics, but it’s still a revenue source that is unwarranted.

        • What if I think it is my God given right to gill net all the fish in the river, to hunt the elk to fund my restaurant and to kill 1,000 deer a month to sell as dog food?

          If the right is “God given” where exactly did God set “limits to population and consumption”?

        • Maybe common sense would have been a better term than god given. The limits I set fourth are enough to sustain. If some dipshit thinks it’s reasonable to take 1000 deer a month or gill net all the fish, then I guess we would need to find that guy and have a “side talk”. Police our own ? Maybe the “frozen fish” technique ?

        • See though I went to the extreme to make a point. So is 5 deer too many, what about 7? Who decides?

          This is what people don’t get about anarchy, there would still be a system of governance (ie rules) just no rulers.

          You’d need some research done, how many hunters, how many deer, reproduction rates, etc. No one is gonna do that for free! There is going to be some cost to be able to take part in use of the “commons” and frankly if the private sector could do as good as Texas Fish and Game does for 50 dollars a year all in for everything down here, I would be pretty happy.

          FWIW if you put a high fence around your property and make sure no deer are on it, then you say buy in deer even white tails and other game fish and game doesn’t have shit to say about a license, seasons, bag limits, etc because it becomes your property.

          I actually think things like Fish and Game Policing is already close to a true anarchy save that there is no competition. In an anarchy groups would band together and select their own company to provide said services over their own commons, etc. Simply put the earth can’t sustain a population of 4-5 billion “hunter gatherers”, but that is another problem all together.

  4. great show Jack…reminds me when I was 16 in Michigan and since a creek hit the road edge I realized I could float my canoe in there to a “private” lake with only two houses on it (I had checked Michigan law before I did this and you are right about the water rights). I caught the biggest slab black crappies that day with a friend. The lady comes out and asks us “how did you get in here” and we just said we paddled up the creek in the canoe. She was a bit puzzled, but let us fish. What a great day.

  5. Growing up in Alaska I’d never even met a fish/game warden, much less ever being asked for my license or checking the number of fish I caught. It’s not too bad now, but not nearly so carefree. Fast forward to last week on a camping road trip through northern Mongolia, one evening a fellow camper gave us a gift of 5 fish (some type of local grayling I think) caught from the stream we were all camped by. He gave them as a gift because he didn’t really know or have a good way to cook them, and he thought I was Russian and cooking fish. I asked him (well with my wife’s help since my Mongolian is still terrible) how much a license costs here, and he just smiled, shrugged, and said “don’t have one”. It’s not QUITE anarchy (for all I know it’s just foreigners need permits/licenses), but the frontier ‘feel’ and relative impotence/distance of the State made me feel a little like being that kid fishing the lake by my dad’s cabin in the Mat-Su Valley again.
    (BTW we were probably as unprepared as he was for cooking fish, but I MacGyvered the whole cleaning/cooking operation with a cheap pocket knife, a plastic food container cut apart for a makeshift cutting board, the little packets of oil and seasoning from a package of Ramen noodles we brought, and our little butane cookstove. The presentation wasn’t the prettiest, but still turned out awfully tasty…)