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  1. I don't think she made that argument, so if you really think that's the position, please provide a quote. At the very least, the patch of land that the house rests on is in use. You physically cannot simultaneously use that patch of land at the same time as me. If you want to use that patch of land, you have to force me off of it (get a crane and push my house to the side) or you can persuade me to get off of it (trade money with me so that I give you the land that the house is sitting on). Now, it might seem like this is all true of man-made resources, but not true of natural resources. The resources are there already! But here's a similarity: the value of those natural resources is man-made because those natural resources have literally no value until somebody figures out how to make use of the resources. The resources are unused, there is no other person occupying the land and doing stuff with it. Anyone is completely free to walk by and start using the land, but again, no one will be making use of the land if they don't know what to do with it. If the reason is, perhaps, that all the people in the town are extreme racists and for that reason deliberately make your life more difficult, we would have a major moral issue here. The issue wouldn't be property rights anymore, though.
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  2. The past repeats itself only because of: collectivism, altruism and statism. Those are what one fights against and advocates individual rights for, to prevent recurrences. They are mystical conceptions, but so is unearned guilt. Most so, taking responsibility for all the acts of all the people of a nation from yesteryear til now. Since he's not a mystic, an Objectivist would never accept his personal unearned guilt. (The 'social conscience' falls into that category). He makes good for the errors he alone made.
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  3. Just as with inventing, whoever chooses to exercise their capacity to turn barren land into something useful (if they have that capacity) is its owner. Barren land which currently serves no purpose does belong to everyone, in a way (since it belongs to nobody) and nobody has a right to prevent anyone from doing whatever they want with such land. I was thinking of the abandoned mine (in an effort to mine the same reference) in Michigan, visited by the vacationing lovebirds. They had driven across Michigan to the ore mine. They had walked through the ledges of an empty pit, with the remnants of a crane like a skeleton bending above them against the sky, and someone's rusted lunchbox clattering away from under their feet. She had felt a stab of uneasiness, sharper than sadness—but Rearden had said cheerfully, "Exhausted, hell! I'll show them how many tons and dollars I can draw out of this place!" On their way back to the car, he had said, "If I could find the right man, I'd buy that mine for him tomorrow morning and set him up to work it." The next day, when they were driving west and south, toward the plains of Illinois, he had said suddenly, after a long silence, "No, I'll have to wait till they junk the Bill. The man who could work that mine, wouldn't need me to teach him. The man who'd need me, wouldn't be worth a damn." It is described as abandoned. Still, Readon thinks of buying it. Interesting. At what point does historically platted land get returned to unowned status legally, and thus subject to the historic precedent of homesteading, or perhaps the yet to be developed Southall Land Grant Claim? Did you find that or make that?
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  4. The assumption seems to be: 1. Western culture is "unattractive" 2. People are magnetically drawn to Islam 3. Muslims are not into survival qua man 4. They come here because they hate us But: 1. Western culture is far more attractive to the young than Islamic tradition. After Several Generations, there is "tendency" to separate from their origins 2. People are not drawn to Islam, they are mostly born to it. There is no strong tendency to join. 3. These are people who want to flourish like anyone else, with the same desires and inner conflicts as any of us. Their fundamental tendency is to be human. 4. They come here because they (tend to) think "we" are better than their country ... unless we assume they are "undesirable" and change their minds The issue with Sharia law is overblown 1. Already arbitration takes place in Synagogues, Churches and Mosques 2. A higher court can overturn their judgements 3 Sharia law, or religious legal enforcement, is based on agreement of the people involved 4. The threat of sharia law taking over the US does not exist Sharia law can never take over because of the support for separation of church and state Support for separation of church and state comes from each religion wanting to be protected from the other. It is not because of "rational" atheists One simply has to do a simple calculation if, the majority of Muslims were not like other humans who tend to want to live their lives and not bother others, 1.3 billion of them would have made far more of a mess than we see.
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