Damn, you are right!  I was just researching the founding documents and John Henry clearly stated that his vision for Nevada is that the Federal Govt buys it then gives the mineral rights to the Koch brothers while the surface rights are owned by some unnamed Chinese who leases it to Bundy fundies and hires Blackwater mercenaries from South Africa to patrol their holdings.

If the owner of the wasteland is getting market value which the Feds cannot (or do not) then it becomes economically viable for wealthy land barrons to retain private armies.  Indeed, the West actually did look a lot like this in it's early days and other similar areas in other nations still do.  Such a state of being is highly romanticized in media such as Bonanza and the various spaghetti westerns where the militia types do most of their historical research, but it had significant downsides for most of the population.  Most of the population were natives, and most are now dead which kind of illustrates what I'm talking about.  Ultimately when a functional democracy started to appear, and an appreciation that 'the redskins', 'the negro', etc really are actual humans became more the norm, things shifted to what we see today which, as evidenced by the 99.9% of ranchers who do pay their bills, ain't half bad.