The "Takings Clause" of the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution seems clear enough: when the government takes an individual's property, it must pay him or her for it. The "Sagebrush Rebellion" refers to the numerous incarnations of a movement to privatize public lands and contain environmental regulation. This latest rebellion is a populist mobilization of historically disenfranchised western small-time property-owners by developmental interests. A rhetorical analysis of the debate between the environmentalists and those behind the rebellion exposes not only the rhetorical practices employed by both sides but also the philosophical and mythical underpinnings; only such an analysis offers some mutual understanding. Neither side in the debate hesitates to employ the full panoply of fallacious reasoning, including ad hominem attacks, poisoning the well, or slippery slope logic. Any critique of the rhetoric will find a rich vein of fallacy and unabashed emotional appeal on both sides. To unpack the foundations of these arguments, analysis must look to an assortment of theoretical orientations: (1) legal theory, which explains that property consists of a wide range of "entitlements," which are not identical to "rights"; (2) postmodernism, which critiques the "self-regarding" (or absolutist) vision of the property owner as independent and self-sufficient; (3) fantasy-theme and symbolic convergence theory, which examines the fantasy theme of cowboys and miners winning the Old West as a pillar of the Wise-Use movement. It can be effectively used for analysis in the classroom. (Contains 48 references.) (TB)