Why must we pay to enjoy Lake Mead?
To the editor:
National Park Service spokesman Andrew Munoz's flawed analogy comparing entrance fees to Lake Mead to taking a family to the movies typifies a federal bureaucrat's sense of entitlement to our money ("Lake Mead rises while visits drop," Monday Review-Journal).
As a U.S. citizen, I am a part owner of the federally controlled Lake Mead area. An owner of a movie theater would not have to pay to take his family to the movies at his own theater.
Most of these taxes -- oops, fees -- go to pay salaries and benefits of a burgeoning federal employee class.
Let's try another, more logical analysis. More bureaucrats equal more regulations and restrictions, lessening the enjoyment of a given facility or federal park.
Stop charging a tax to enjoy the many properties we already own, from Lake Mead and Valley of Fire to Red Rock Canyon. It's time to trim the federal herd.
Brian Covey
Las Vegas
Currency laws
To the editor:
Vin Suprynowicz (Sunday column) is apparently unaware that, under federal law, any and all local or community currency must be redeemable at face value with U.S. dollars, and that it cannot be designed to be easily confused with actual U.S. currency.
Bernard von NotHaus' "liberty dollars" violated that law in that they bore the word "liberty" (as U.S. coins do), were issued in denominations of "dollars," bore the slogan "Trust In God" (as opposed to "In God We Trust"), and many of the coins bore a liberty head image very similar to U.S. coins of the past.
Had he simply sold them as silver rounds with no currency amounts minted on them, as many silver assay and mining companies do, he would still be in business and not behind bars.
Steven F. Scharff
Henderson
No hunt
To the editor:
A recent wire service article in the Review-Journal reported that Big Wildlife and NoBearHuntNV.org have petitioned the Department of the Interior, asking for Nevada's black bears to be given protection as an endangered species. This is incorrect.
The petition asks that the bears in the Sky Islands of Nevada be classified as a distinct population.
This same classification was granted Florida's bears, not because they were genetically different, but because their population was stressed by environmental mediators -- in the case of the Florida bears, by the number killed annually by cars.
The density of Nevada's wild land bears has diminished dramatically, putting them at great risk. Independent analysis of all available data by leading bear biologists specializing in population dynamics shows Nevada's wild land bears are not sustaining their population due to relocation to the urban interface. Hunting is scientifically demonstrated to both increase bears moving into the human interface and to contribute to the loss of wild land bears.
For this reason, Nevada bears should not be hunted.
Kathryn Bricker
Zephyr Cove
