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How is Land Ownership Acquired ... Initially

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Swerve of Shore

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Just a recorder then, eh? No agency of man's self-defense with a monopoly on the legal use of force?? OK, let's test this...

You find a piece of unclaimed property and fence it in, then record your claim with government. I force you to abandon the property, then record my claim, and government just erases your name and adds mine.

Is that how it works, Nicky?

Now you're just acting up.

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Aside from Euro predispositions , were the PreColumbian aborigines of the northern new world afforded the expectations of assimilation into the frontier culture? And if so did they refuse?

That varies across times and locations, obviously. They certainly weren't treated as individuals, each given a choice and judged by it. There was plenty of racism involved.

But there wasn't a plan for mass extermination or displacement. That was not the intention of the colonists, that was the eventual result of widespread conflict caused by native hostility. (if you look at the history of the British Empire, they didn't exterminate nations and tribes by default)

Again: not all the natives were hostile, not even close, and the peaceful tribes and individuals were not always treated fairly. Far from it. But the core igniter for the conflict was native hostility and savagery, not the colonists desire for the land they were living on. The violence against peaceful colonists caused fear and resentment among Europeans, and lead to often irrational actions.

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How is the initial right of ownership in a piece of land rightfully acquired?

Possession, demonstrated objectively by making use of that land by improving it with roads, fencing it in, ploughing it, building upon it. The same method justifies the transfer of formal title from a negligent or absentee owner to the occupant in cases of adverse possession.

Using land for hunting or grazing without leaving marks upon the land is problematic because others have no objective means to distinguish possessed from non-possessed land. In a conflict of claims between a farmer and hunter, the farmer wins by weight of evidence. The hunter's only recourse is prevention, by participating in the formal property registration scheme of the farmer's local government and by patrolling his land and learning to mark it.

The Cherokee did all that more, becoming farmers themselves living in a town and inventing an alphabet for their language but they were run out of their property anyway out of sheer malice and racism. The Cherokee had many allies in advocating their case legally and even won a Supreme Court case defending their rights but Democratic President Andrew Jackson simply ignored the Supreme Court. Wiki:Trail of Tears.

They are believed to have numbered some 22,500 individuals in 1650, and they controlled approximately 40,000 square miles (100,000 square km) of the Appalachian Mountains in parts of present-day Georgia, eastern Tennessee, and the western Carolinas at that time.

Even conceding that the eventual treatment of the Cherokee was an outrage, it was never going to be possible that so few people could defend so much land as they initially claimed against adverse possession claims by encroaching settlers.

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Let us imagine the Natives and Euros arriving on the shores of an unpopulated continent. By the standard of claiming property with self sustaining actions backed by unequal force, e.g. arrows to cannons, do you suppose the distribution of property would have been very much different than it is today, i.e. Euro domination with small portions reserved for Natives??

While this is no doubt accurate as a matter of Realpolitik, it is an inaccurate application of Objectivist principles. Application of force itself is not the sort of "self-sustaining action" referred to. Force is reserved to enforce rights acquired by other means: in the discussion here, that would be such things as planting seeds and building houses. If there were agreement between the Euros and the Natives as to what constituted rights in real property and how it was claimed, then arrows and cannons would be equal. Both would be pointed at those who violated this agreement.

My original post raised a different point, though. Namely, that there was no such agreement between the Euros and the Natives. In fact, it is doubtful that there could be. Most of the Natives were hunters, not farmers. So, rights in land would be fluid rather than fixed, depending on where the game migrated from time to time. Planting seeds and building houses would not be seen as key indicia of "ownership". How you would properly claim and enforce such fluid rights is a very difficult theoretical question. The answer of the Native tribes (who would have thought in terms of tribal or community rights rather than individual rights) was clearly Realpolitik. When two tribes came into conflict, either Might Made Right or, if both had sufficient Might, then a Treaty would split up rights.

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After reading several accounts of interactions between the Euros and Natives, particularly Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, I'm not convinced the Natives (as a group) practiced Realpolitik. If anything, the Natives seemed to practice land use and property claims similar to Locke's premise where land and resources are plentiful. The primary disadvantage of the Natives was a lack of the same experiences (overpopulation, disease, famine) which led the Euros to develop technology (weaponry, medicine, harvesting) prior to migrating to the Americas; one hardly needs to invent a harvester while an abundance of low hanging fruit remains within reach. Philosophically, the Natives bartered with the Euros for existing property claims according to the Native's experience of plentiful land and resources, and the Euros bartered according to their foreknowledge of scarcer land and resources resulting from a continuous migration following from Europe.

As to your original post, both Natives and Euros initially acquired unclaimed property the usual way, by taking it and then defending their claim with force. The interesting part to me however remains in justifying (by any party) this initial claim to property. How does the fortunate circumstance of being unchallenged in acquiring a common (non-man made) resource like land, equate to earning it? Using land is certainly justified, but denying others use of surplus land one acquired unchallenged, creates an ethical problem for me.

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