The resource curse occurs when there are abundant natural resources and a group of people small enough to coordinate action controls those resources. In the ea

The resource curse occurs when there are abundant natural resources and a group of people small enough to coordinate action controls those resources. In the eastern half of the USA, most of the land is owned by (relatively) small holders, who are too numerous to not compete against each other. That is slowly changing as consolidation continues to occur, but the base ownership of resources is so diffuse that there would still need to be a lot of consolidation for resource cartels to become dominant. Besides winning the Civil War and outlawing slavery, the Lincoln administration also passed one of the most momentous series of laws in American economic history with the Homestead Acts, which sold almost 10% of the total area of the US for pennies as long as the land would be homesteaded, that is, occupied by someone who worked the land. This was a deliberate policy of the Free Soil movement to prevent moneyed interests, primarily plantation owners, from gobbling up the frontier. In eastern places where large estates had already been assembled, such as Appalachian coal country and the Mississippi Delta, politics has been predictably corrupt and exploitative. Where the frontier land was not homesteaded (mostly arid western lands), "land barons" gained control of much of it and began to manipulate local politics in a similarly predictable way. The remaining western public lands also benefited from the notion of "scientific administration" in vogue during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Some land agencies are worse than others (Parks service is a far better steward than the BLM, for example) but by and large the federal agencies have succeeded in preventing the formation of new land baronies.