Who is burning down the forests in the western United States?

It turns out the largest wildfires in the history of Arizona and Colorado were deliberately set by ... government firefighters.

Leonard Gregg, 29, a Bureau of Indian Affairs firefighter, was arrested last week for intentionally starting the Arizona blaze. Why? He reportedly told investigators he did it for money. Firefighters get paid to fight fires. And Gregg needed some money.

Last month, Terry Barton, a U.S. Forest Service employee, was charged with setting Colorado's enormous blaze.

Once again, when it comes to land management and fire control, government policies and people have emerged as the source of the problem rather than the solution.

With firefighters like these, who needs arsonists, terrorists and careless firebugs?

Hundreds of homes were lost. Hundreds of thousands of acres were destroyed. And, because government employees were behind the acts, there will be no justice, no accountability. Government seldom restores the victims in such cases. And when it does, who pays? You and I do.

That's the trouble with government taking over more and more responsibility for our lives.

Advocates of widespread government intervention contend that it is the best way to achieve accountability. It turns out to be the worst.

Sure, there will be punishment for the individuals responsible. But the supervisors who hired the unstable and irresponsible people who endangered lives and destroyed property on a massive scale will not be scrutinized. The forest policies that have caused even worse devastation in recent years – like the blaze that destroyed Yellowstone a few years back – go unquestioned.

Only when Americans grow more skeptical of government action – especially those actions not supported by the Constitution – will they begin to see that government often does more harm than good, not just in forests, but in cities, in suburbs … everywhere.

"Well, Farah," you might say, "what are you suggesting? Should the government stop fighting fires?"

No, fighting fires is a legitimate function of government – local government.

That's the way most fires are fought and contained – by local people.

The problem begins with the immense tracts of land the U.S. government has accumulated over the years – with no constitutional justification. The U.S. government is still collecting land for various reasons – to protect the environment, to save endangered species, to preserve the character of the wilderness, to pay off big political contributors, to consolidate power, to restrict access by ordinary citizens. No way can any central government actually do a better job managing and protecting such vast land holdings as efficiently as private and local landowners could.

That's just a fact.

Yet, Americans are still not putting it together – still not connecting the very obvious dots.

A few months ago, we learned government-sponsored environmental researchers fraudulently planted evidence of endangered species where none exist. In that case, five U.S. Fish and Wildlife and two Washington state researchers planted lynx hairs in areas where the cats did not exist. At your expense, the researchers were conducting a four-year study of 57 forests in 16 states to determine the extent of endangered lynx habitat. But that's not what they were doing at all. It was an effort, on the taxpayer's dime, to create evidence to buffalo the taxpayer.

Had the fraud not been exposed – and you can imagine how many similar ones are not – the findings of these rip-off artists would have been used to create sweeping new land restrictions against property owners, citizens who utilize the forests for recreation and those who make their living in the wilderness. The perpetuators of the fraud were not even charged with any criminal wrongdoing. They kept their jobs and were simply reassigned to other projects – where, presumably, their eco-activism shrouded in the cloak of scientific research will be channeled into new efforts to shake down the taxpayer and maximize federal control of land and forests.

It seems clear the actions of these government activists were motivated by something more than a desire to preserve cats in a natural habitat in which they did not reside.

Clearly, it's about establishing more federal control over more land. That was the goal. It remains the goal. The charade has been exposed. But most Americans see it not.

While the lynx scam got more of the headlines, the Forest Service was forced to admit earlier this year it had lied to Congress and the public about the number of visitors to national forests. The agency claimed 920 million visitors in 2000, while the real number was 209 million.

Once again, the deceit was about money – bigger budgets, more control, larger bureaucracies, increased regulations and more restrictions on access by the people who pay for it all.

Unless you demand it, there will be no change in the culture of federal land management. There will be no sell-off of federal land. There will be no accountability for bad policies and bad people.