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"Native Americans"

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Vetiver

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What can be said about the European settlers' right to New American land versus pre-existing Native American culture? What is the pre-requisite to establishing ownership of property -- hunting / subsisting on the land, sticking a flagpole in it, or writing up a deed? If Native Americans opposed colonialist expansion into a given tract of land they considered theirs, should European settlers be considered immoral in invading and claiming that land? Admittedly I don't know much about this history period, and this question came up as I flipped through channels and saw Dances with Wolves... but I'd still like to know others' views on this.

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Thank you for the reference. I don't dispute the savagery of American Indians or mourn Europeans colonizing and civilizing America. I just wonder what the threshold is for entitlement to land. If my neighbors are irrational, worshiping rain gods and smoking opium all day, can I claim their three-acre forest as my own? Perhaps this is specifically answered in the book, but I wonder if I can't find the answer without spending $25.

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Thank you for the reference. I don't dispute the savagery of American Indians or mourn Europeans colonizing and civilizing America. I just wonder what the threshold is for entitlement to land. If my neighbors are irrational, worshiping rain gods and smoking opium all day, can I claim their three-acre forest as my own? Perhaps this is specifically answered in the book, but I wonder if I can't find the answer without spending $25.

I think the objectivist answer could probably be derived from Rand's view on the justifiability of a capitalist country invading a socialist country. If it was in their best interests to do so they would be justified, if the place they were invading did not protect the rights of it's citizens. If a government steps in and passes a law protecting the individual liberties of people in a country, they are not harmed by it. This justifies coming here in general...certainly acts of barbarism and the initiation of force from both sides would not be likely to be defensible.

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Thank you for the reference. I don't dispute the savagery of American Indians or mourn Europeans colonizing and civilizing America. I just wonder what the threshold is for entitlement to land. If my neighbors are irrational, worshiping rain gods and smoking opium all day, can I claim their three-acre forest as my own? Perhaps this is specifically answered in the book, but I wonder if I can't find the answer without spending $25.

You cannot claim it IF they legitimately own it. To "own" land does not mean that one just hunts on it, or wanders over it. The person who wishes to own unowned land must make some substantial improvements to the land.

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If my neighbors are irrational, worshiping rain gods and smoking opium all day, can I claim their three-acre forest as my own?
It doesn't matter what you smoke or worship. What matters is whether you grasp fundamental concepts of human rights. For instance, if I say "This land here is my land", do you understand what that means and will you respect my right? If I buy land from you, do you understand that it is no longer yours, and that it is now irrevocably mine? Is your claim to your land based on a rational concept of ownership, or does it reduce to an irrational claim such as "The Great Spirit / God / The King gave me this land". Or, more like "... gave my people this land". This is the most basic problem with primitive land claims, that they have very indefinite extent. You can't know exactly what is owned, or by whom. The fact that a person happens to use some land on an occasion doesn't constitute a claim of ownership. To own the land, you must first recognize that the land has value for your life, and that keeping it and exerting exclusive control over it is necessary for you to live. You also have to grasp the concepts of exclusive ownership, and ownership by right (rather than force). Exclusive ownership does not mean that two people cannot jointly own property, but if they do, they must act as one individual, and have a non-violent means of resolving disputes.
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By what right can you just claim something that you did nothing to earn?
There is a "construction" myth about property rights, which I so wish would go away. It is not the case that you have to build a building or something like that on the land in order to claim the land. In a civilized society, procedures are established for laying claim to unclaimed land, and that can include simply registering a claim. You have to "act" in some substantial way, but you don't have to clear the forest or put up a fence. It would be sufficient to use the land for grazing your reindeer.
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There is a "construction" myth about property rights, which I so wish would go away. It is not the case that you have to build a building or something like that on the land in order to claim the land. In a civilized society, procedures are established for laying claim to unclaimed land, and that can include simply registering a claim. You have to "act" in some substantial way, but you don't have to clear the forest or put up a fence. It would be sufficient to use the land for grazing your reindeer.

I think I was imprecise in my phrasing; I was arguing what one SHOULD have to do to convert unowned land to owned land, not what one DOES have to do.

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I think I was imprecise in my phrasing; I was arguing what one SHOULD have to do to convert unowned land to owned land, not what one DOES have to do.
I suppose my response was equally imprecise, so I should clarify that I was giving a "should". There are a couple additional points about your answer that I'd like to underscore. First, "Because I saw it first" is perfectly valid, and is, for example, a foundational pillar of patent law. If not "first come, first served", what other objective principle can you have to identify which person owns the land? Second, the Homestead Act did indeed prevent a man from claiming 10,000 acres. but that is bad. The idea that a man's "fair share" of the land is 160 acres is based on a bad socialist principle ("fair share"). There is nothing wrong with laying claim to 1,000 or 10,000 acres. What I think you're pointing to is the need to objectively establish ownership. That is, I can't just come up to a person's house and say "You're on my land, I saw it first, 5 years ago". You have to get that idea "I need this land" out of your head, and into the physical world.
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I'm going to have to disagree with you, David.

First, "Because I saw it first" is perfectly valid, and is, for example, a foundational pillar of patent law.

No, it is not. The foundation of patent law is "because I made it first", which is fundamentally different from just seeing it. You can't patent, say, a discovery, which would constitute "because I saw it first."

What I think you're pointing to is the need to objectively establish ownership. That is, I can't just come up to a person's house and say "You're on my land, I saw it first, 5 years ago". You have to get that idea "I need this land" out of your head, and into the physical world.

You establish property ownership of things that you just find lying around in nature by putting some sort of work into them. If you're an aboriginal savage that finds a blackberry bush and you pick the blackberries, those are your blackberries because you've put work into them. If you're a modern inventor and you develop a cancer-fighting drug, it's your drug.

Likewise you can't claim 10,000 acres or even 10 acres as your grazing territory if you've just driven your reindeer through it. They are your reindeer, but the land doesn't become yours until you've made some kind of improvement to it (such as by damming a river to improve grass growth or what have you). Likewise the extent of the land you can claim via this method is also limited because there is a definite limitation on the extent of the improvements you have made.

The Homestead Act and the Oklahoma Land Rush were admittedly a bit odd, but that's what happens when the government messes around with the economy. IIRC the purpose of the act was to get more people living in Oklahoma as soon as possible, specifically farmers, so the land parcels were supposed to be what you could realistically hope to turn into farmland via your own effort, considering the tools available at that time. It would have been ludicrously unfair to tell all the waiting would-be claimants that they had to wait until the first claimant had proved as much land as he possibly could so they could then adjust the property lines.

Stone-age savages don't own property not because they don't understand the concept of rights or live in a society that protects those rights, but because they don't put effort into the land. Some groups may do some sort of farming, but my understanding is that most Native American tribes at the time were nomadic, growing a crop and then leaving that parcel of land to hunt, then relocating their village again. How on earth could you figure out which parcel of land they owned under this system?

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The foundation of patent law is "because I made it first", which is fundamentally different from just seeing it. You can't patent, say, a discovery, which would constitute "because I saw it first."
Yeah, there is a difference -- I was pointing to the "first" issue, not whether seeing is the same as making. Seeing first, discovering first, making first, whatever: the point is that under objective law, the first person has the valid claim. Not the second person, last person, strongest person or wealthiest person.
You establish property ownership of things that you just find lying around in nature by putting some sort of work into them.
I agree, the question is, what kind of work? One example, in a primitive society with no or only minimal legal formalities, would be literally staking a claim, that is, putting up stakes that delimit the boundaries of the land that you have laid claim to. There are other, more elaborate ways to establish your claim, such as building a fence around the land, or clear-cutting the land and planting alfalfa. In a civilized society with legal procedures and systematic title-recording, a survey and filing would be sufficient.
Likewise you can't claim 10,000 acres or even 10 acres as your grazing territory if you've just driven your reindeer through it. They are your reindeer, but the land doesn't become yours until you've made some kind of improvement to it (such as by damming a river to improve grass growth or what have you).
No, that is untrue. You are right that the act of passing over land doesn't make the land your, but improvements, whatever they are, are not necessary to justify ownership of land (or any other unowned item). What is required is application of knowledge and effort. It is in no way necessary for you to fiddle with the land in order to be able to own it, and in some contexts, fiddling with the land is against your best interest. Consider for example a vast forest, waiting to be exploited. The civilized approach to such a resource is that the first person to recognize this value and to claim it as theirs to use can do so. At that point, the owner may exploit those resources as they see fit, knowing that this is now their property. That means, in a rights-respecting society, that nobody else is going to come and chop down their trees, dig up the coal, or divert their water or in general hold that their idea of what to do with the land is a better use. It means that as the owner of the land, it is my right to decide to harvest the trees or not, to dig up the coal or not, to divert the water or not; and no other person can by right come onto my land and claim "You are not using these trees, so I think I will chop them down and make use of them" or "I think I'll put in a coal mine here, since you're not doing that".

A coal mine would not be an improvement of the land if you intended to use the land as watershed (please bear in mind that in a free society, water is a commercially exploitable resource, and 10,000 acres of untouched land would, in the right location, be very valuable as a natural water storage and filtering system). You yourself may not be interested in maintaining land in an "untouched by human hands" state, and indeed if you get to the land and claim ownership of it first, you do get to rip out all of the trees and extract all of the coal, if that is what you want to do.

Stone-age savages don't own property not because they don't understand the concept of rights or live in a society that protects those rights, but because they don't put effort into the land.
I disagree entirely. It makes no sense at all to say that you must build on or flood every square inch of land in order to own the land. All stone age savages that I know do actually "put effort into the land", although may be hard for the layman to detect, and rather minimal. The same can be said of many real estate investors, especially people who recognize the vast potential profit to be made off of recreational land. Go look at some local real estate development, where Builditco buys up a few square miles of woodlands, and starts building housing in one part of their land. Okay, they've cleared the trees off of this tract so they clearly own that land; but that whole section up north is just sitting there! Unused, unimproved, unowned. Ready for the taking, so if I get there and clear that part of the land, then it becomes mine, because it wasn't owned before (the supposed "owner" didn't really own the land, because he hadn't improved that part of the land).

Now of course you recognize that this is not how civilized existence works. So where did things do wrong? Exactly in separating the concept of land ownership from a system that protects rights, and instead tying the notion of ownership to a certain kind of act, namely "doing something to the land". The only objective function behind leaving your mark is to provide proof of ownership. We have other ways of doing that, now. The problem with Native American land claim is that it's usually impossible to separate real and bogus claims, because they did not keep records.

How on earth could you figure out which parcel of land they owned under this system?
Exactly!! Stone-age primitive land claims are basically a problem of having no legal system for registering land ownership, in which case you have to substitute primitive demarcation methods like building a fence around the land, or cutting down all of the trees, or growing corn for three years in a row. When you have a system of laws, this becomes unnecessary, and is replaced with a title search, survey, and claim-filing.
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Stone-age savages don't own property not because they don't understand the concept of rights or live in a society that protects those rights, but because they don't put effort into the land. Some groups may do some sort of farming, but my understanding is that most Native American tribes at the time were nomadic, growing a crop and then leaving that parcel of land to hunt, then relocating their village again. How on earth could you figure out which parcel of land they owned under this system?

This satisfies my question best. Thanks for your response, as well as everyone else who replied.

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Perhaps a "legal system for asserting land ownership" serves as a slightly-less-tangible means of "improving" the property? By following the legal procedures for asserting land ownership, you "clear title" to the land, thus making it more marketable by adding to it the "protective barrier" of the law. In at least one sense, getting yourself legally recognized as the owner of land improves the value of that land.

Though on the other hand, getting yourself legally recognized as the owner of land might also open you up to property taxation. Does this de-value the land sufficiently that the "improvement" obtained through legal protection is annulled? If so, does anyone own their land if that land is subject to taxation? (I say no, but that's for another thread.)

-Q

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As far as I can determine, the big problem with American Indians is their tribalism. Whatever "claim" they had to patches of land were tribal claims. Tribes don't own land; individuals do. This problem meant there would be a conflict when an individual non-Indian farmer came along and began farming a plot of land.

Individual rights are the basis of an advanced capitalist society. The Indians had little, if any, concept of such rights. Given their lack of knowledge of such rights, it seems that conflict with non-Indians was inevitable.

Interestingly, some Indians lived in permanent villages, or even cities, and farmed. The Pueblo Indians of New Mexico lived in a dozen or so permanent villages and survived by farming. The more advanced Aztec, Mayan and Incan civilizations of Mexico, Central and South America sometimes lived in rather large cities (e.g.: Tenochtitlan, capital of the Aztecs, population: 200,000 in the 15th century) and engaged in extensive farming.

These more advanced, stable societies would seem to have had some justification for exhibiting a right to property. However, they were incredibly mystical, collectivist, and devoid of individualism (e.g.: human sacrifices). Conflict with the relatively more individualist West was inevitable, even if the Spaniards were incredibly brutal in their own ways.

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Whatever "claim" they had to patches of land were tribal claims. Tribes don't own land; individuals do.
This is generally so, as long as you understand 'individual' as meaning something more than 'one person'. As an example, The Ayn Rand Institute is not one person, but ARI does own chairs, books, tables and perhaps some land. Corporate ownership and joint ownership are perfectly valid forms of ownership. The way this typically plays out in primitive societies is that a family will own some land, and there will be rules about how decisions are made about use.
Individual rights are the basis of an advanced capitalist society. The Indians had little, if any, concept of such rights.
This, I think, is the most significant factor. Whereas we have individuals and corporations, they had only corporations.
Conflict with the relatively more individualist West was inevitable, even if the Spaniards were incredibly brutal in their own ways.
And finally, the whole "We were bad to the Indians" routine is based on a huge "so what?". In fact I have never been bad to anybody: I have never owned a slave and never stolen anybody's land. If anyone in my family ever did, I have no idea who did, or why it would have anything to do with me. The Indians were evil, the while men were evil, everybody was evil, now we can get over because that was a long time ago. What else is evil is the idea that there is some kind of racial inheritance of land and guilt, and this is an evil being promulgated by the multiculturalist twits now.
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The issue of Western settlers appropriating portions of tribal lands in order to make them productive raises an interesting comparison. What is the proper way to convert a Communist society into a capitalist one? I am thinking specifically here of the former Soviet Union and the so-called "oligarchs" who "stole" the "people's property" in a variety of shady schemes in the 1990s.

My contention is that "the people" cannot own anything. Ownership is a function of individuals or their delegated entities, such as corporations (thank you, David Odden, for making that clarification above). Essentially, all of the land, factories, equipment, etc., that were operated by the Communist government, is the equivalent of the open prairie of the American West. It is "found goods" for anyone who desires to find them, possess them and make them productive, much like a farmer who tills virgin prairie and makes it productive gains ownership of it.

My observation is that many of these oligarchs, once they acquired the property, used it to produce values. They became capitalists (albeit with lots of corruption surrounding them). In particular, Mikhail Khodorkovsky is one of those oligarch-capitalists. He formed the Russian oil company Yukos from a base of former "state property" and made into a very productive enterprise. For that, he was put into a Siberian jail. Now, it turns out Putin is adding more trumped-up charges against him, so that it is likely he will stay in jail many more years.

It is interesting and sad to see a former KGB officer (Putin) put someone in jail on charges that he "stole" from the "people". I can only imagine what actual crimes Putin is guilty of.

In any case, apart from the specific case of Khodorkovsky, I am interested in what everyone thinks on this issue, of how Communist "property" should be converted into capitalist property. I am also interested in the case of Khodorkovsky, in case anyone wants to comment.

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