I’ve struggled with this issue for some time - hoping I can get some insight from this group.
Originally, in this nation, the land was used by the indigenous tribes. Colonization resulted in wholesale confiscation of this land from it’s previous “owners” who of course had not land ‘title’ system. But by the tenets of laissez faire economics, those inhabitants worked the land, thus owned it, and so the land was stolen from them by the settlers.
In other words, according to the Lockean theory of justice of landed property - mixing one’s labor, and so forth - surely, according to this doctrine, the original inhabitants of these lands owned them. They did not, perhaps, ‘work’ them as we might want to work them - less cultivation, more hunting and so forth, no factories obviously, though hunting provided raw materials for the crafting (aka manufacturing) that they did - but they worked them nonetheless.
Obviously, if you stray from Locke in the direction of the more radical anarchists (Tucker, Ingalls, George) it becomes even more persuasive of an argument. You have to move away from anarchism, it seems to me, to justify our current system.
Should it - all of it - not be returned to their closest descendants, if we are to remain consistent in our principles as libertarians/ancaps/free market laissez faire types? Does time erase injustice?
They moved around and displaced other tribes just as much as the Europeans, Asians and Africans. All these plains tribes that are glorified in the cowboy movies didn’t exist prior to the Spanish introducing horses to the Americas and there were tribes that occupied those lands before they stole the land through their superior technology for one example.
Perhaps if you go back and trace the decedents of the original settler for a particular piece of land then you might have a case but if not you are just rewarding the decedents for the exact same thing you feel guilty for. More than likely there were multiple migrations into the Americas so you would have to first figure out who lead the first migration and the path they took and then do the exact same thing for the next migration until all virgin land was accounted for. Then you have to determine which tribes were forcefully evicted and which ones voluntarily moved into virgin lands.
Some tribes had actual private property land rights so you would have to trace the descendant of the rightful owner to a particular piece of property, assuming it was a chain of legal acquisition all the way to it’s virgin status, and then you could be sure you weren’t falsely rewarding someone.
Mind you there is nothing even close to written records and the majority of the oral traditions were lost due to epidemics following the European discovery of the New World.
The Australian Aborigines on the other hand have a solid case under your argument as do quite a few island tribes.
To change the subject a bit, I know a Navajo girl that grew up on contested tribal land. She says, and I’ve heard this from other sources, that the only thing that keeps the Hopi from forcefully evicting her family is the federal government being involved. Mind you none of this land was ever traditional Hopi lands, it just happened to end up that way when they set up the reservation systems for these two tribes but that doesn’t stop them from trying to lay claim to their ‘rightful’ property. From what she was saying the last time I talked to her the Hopi authorities constantly harass the families living on the contested land trying to force them to move away so they can ‘legally’ take possession. Apparently she even has to get a permit to allow non-resident visitors to even step foot on her family’s property, payable to the Hopi nation of course.
Nope, the Native Americans aren’t a bunch of saints…
As Anonymous Coward suggests, there is a time problem involved here.
I tend to think of it similarly to how I think of reparations for slavery. When slavery was abolished, I think that the slaves did deserve compensation. But once generations and generations have passed, to the point where all of the people in question are dead and the property in question has been transformed significantly and/or been transfered in ownership many times, it is impossible to have compensation. Don’t get me wrong: I am extremely in favor of compensating victims. But we are talking about scenarios here where it is impossible to do so. It is so long “after the fact” that justice seems impossible.
No descendant of slaves alive today is a slave and no descendant of a slave-owner today is a slave-owner. To force innocent individuals to “compensate” all African Americans, whom they have done no wrong to, would be absurd and unjust in itself. I think the same is true of the natives and the land question. I definitely sympathize with the natives in that there was a significant degree of land theft that they were subjected to, but there really isn’t much of a practical remedy for it now. To force everyone or loads of innocent people to suddenly give their land up to indians would be an injustice and grave absurdity in itself.
It’s not that time erases injustice, it’s that justice becomes impossible in some circumstances if there is a great enough time lag between the event in question and the attempt to remedy it.
And for clarification purposes: there is no discernable just owner of entire nations. Neither the natives or the colonials have a legitimate claim over the entirety of America. Some of it is/was simply unused/unowned land. The colonials legitimately owned that previously unused/owned land by which they homesteaded or voluntarily purchased, and the natives legitimately owned that land which they homesteaded and already occupied (even if some of them did not believe in land ownership, they still owned it in practise); and everything else is unowned. To grant either side a monopoly would be mistaken.
As Rothbard notes in “The Ethics of Liberty”, you cannot own it beyond the extent that you make first-use of or control it (I.E. I cannot just land on an island and claim to own the entire thing without actually homesteading or purchasing the entire thing; I can only legitimately own that portion which results either from my labor or from me purchasing it from a willing seller that is a legitimate owner themselves). I believe that the consistant application of Rothbard’s theory of legitimacy in property titles delegitimizes all “nations”, since all “nations” consist of a claim of ownership that extends beyond that which has been homesteaded or voluntarily traded for.
On a somewhat related note: a common challenge posed to market anarchists is, once the state is gone, what happens to all of this “public property”? The proper answer, as far as I can tell, is that it is “homesteadable”, it may as well be viewed as unowned property to be appropriated. Since the state has redistributed wealth and property so much, it is impossible to discern a just owner of the entirely of “public property”; even if we consider the tax-payer to own a quotal share of it, it would be impossible to adequately distribute this quotal share. So basically it should and would be transformed in turn by the people to whatever extent they can manage.
Labor can’t be “mixed” with land. Land can only be labored upon by the first person who, solely by chance, happens to come across it
I agree with the Georgist argument against land ownership, but then I also believe THAT if land ownership is unjustifiable, so is property because all property ownership can only be based upon land ownership. So, Locke’s whole argument supporting land ownership (which even he didn’t support in every circumstance, I.E. public goods like water wells) is nonsense.
The only justification for individual land ownership or property, in general, is individual prosperity.
If you combine this with egoism, you could still end up with something like the Objectivist argument for property rights… But then, I think Objectivism and egoism are also nonsense.
This argument is ethically flawed. Because they ‘weren’t a bunch of saints’ the original colonists and settlers afterward were justified in not being saints, too? In other words, ‘they stole it first’ - yet without the written records this cannot be proven, so we should simply assume that ALL the land was stolen to begin with, and therefore free game???
As for displacing other tribes, this argument falls completely flat. Over time, the American government has displaced just about ALL of the indigenous population. Surely, the magnitude of THAT displacement is enormous, comparitively.
The whole argument is just a rationalization for the status quo as far as I can tell, and has no solid ethical basis, in my view.
This has been pretty much my view, but I continue to feel that it’s just too pat an answer to satisfy.
Anytime the resolution to some ethical question benefits the perpetrator of injustice - I am talking about the US government, which entity has existed intact since the time of the injustice - and maintains the status quo, that’s not a good ethical resolution.
I do think it is an important distinction to make, that we are not talking about blaming individual Americans, which is what any kind of reparations, of course, tries to do. It’s the State that is to blame, and the State that should be held to account, and yet of course the State is not a separate entity that can be taken to task. It has involved us all in its crimes as accomplices through our use and acceptance of the various predatory systems it implements.
As noted, I don’t have a good answer, but every time I drive through a rez, and recognize that the actions of the American State have led directly to the appalling conditions there, it bugs the hell outta me. Just another set of victims of the criminal State.
Oh wow, did I actually say that? I don’t think so…
What I did was give you a road map to a course of action that would be acceptable to me in order to give the lands back to the Native Americans.
As for defending the status quo, I would stand to directly gain from your original argument since my grandmother’s grandmother was full-blooded Cherokee and there is an actual Supreme Court decision against forcing them off their traditional lands so it would be quite trivial for me to go claim a part of Georgia.
Go look up a linguistic map of Native American tribes post-Columbus and tell me there wasn’t mass migrations going on. There are linguistic groups, pretty much the only practical way to track their movements, that are widely separated from any close relatives and are surrounded by many different groups that have the same characteristics.
If you really want a starting place for your theory you can start with protecting my friends traditional lands from Hopi aggression. Then maybe you can start with the rest of the continent…
That’s just the problem, though; both the perpetrator(s) and the victim(s) of injustice are long since passed away. Any resolution in which the criminal and victim are no longer in existence would be either meaningless or involve further injustice in an attempt to punish or reward the descendants of the actual actors.
History is nothing but a five thousand year old list of expropriations. The only way out of this problem is to declare an amnesty, in the interest of peace.
Yeah. Because, clearly, ‘Hopi aggression’ is the root of injustice here.
AC, perhaps I misread, but your entire post was basically a ‘they stole it first, so they had it coming’ argument. I’ll go point by point so it is clear what you ‘actually’ said and what you ‘actually’ did not.
The indigenous tribes were not ‘saints’ - what does this have to do with anything? This sort of en masse collective blame belongs nowhere in an ethical argument.
Indigenous tribes displaced other indigenous tribes via technology - this is clearly an implied justification for the proposition that it was thus OK for settlers to in turn displace tribes via technological superiority themselves. Two wrongs = a right, again, does not belong in an ethical argument.
To solve the problem, we would have to “first figure out who lead the first migration and the path they took and then do the exact same thing for the next migration until all virgin land was accounted for” - the blindingly obvious implication that any reasonble person would draw here is that we might as well not even worry about it since there’s no way we can know every single thing about who stole what when, and from whom. This is a preposterous implication, in my view.
Unless we can know for sure the “chain of legal acquisition all the way to it’s virgin status”, there’s nothing we can do. This is a laughable argument, inasmuch is says ‘let the recipients of stolen goods keep them if we can’t figure out who the original purchasre was - even if we know from whom it was originally stolen.’ Once again, this logic is preposterous.
There are no written records available - so we can’t know with certainty who really owned what. Similar to the old ‘rub out the witness so there’s nobody to testify against you’ defense. Ethically hollow.
I’m not trying to start a fight, but I was looking for an ethical argument according to the tenets of libertarianism/anarcho-capitalism, and what I got was for all intents and purposes a practical rationalization that might just as easily have come from a Bush supporter.
But that’s the point I was trying to make - the perpetrator DOES exist - the perpetrator was not the army, or the settlers, or even the original colonists. It was, for the most part, the American STATE - and that DOES still exist, and still bears the responsibility.
I suppose one thing I am trying to get at here is that most libs/ancaps I talk to castigate the State for all sorts of current and past abuses of life and liberty. But the worst abuse I can see, even more egregious than slavery, not to downplay the vastly egregious nature of that abuse, is the genocide of the indigenous inhabitants.
Now, I know that we must take historical context into account, but I think even having done so, this abuse stands out like a screaming neon sign, which is ignored by the vast majority, including by libs/ancaps. And this historical fact fatally undermines the entire popular notion of the State as a social and beneficial entity (which misconception lies at the heart of the argument for minarchy, IMO), when it is in fact an anti-human, anti-individual, malevolently anti-social entity. And it is the misconceptions about the nature of the State - which ALWAYS finds its origins inevitably in “conquest and confiscation”, in Nock’s words - that is at the root of the difficulty we have in educating people about liberty.
This is sensible, I think. Yet, prior to an amnesty, genocide should be acknowledged and the State should accept responsibility for it. Absent that, an amnesty would just be empty and self-justifying. If anything, perhaps such an acknowledgment would give our rulers pause before they proclaim with such self-righteous piety their next campaign to ‘make the world safe for democracy.’
Kind of like the en masse collective blame you are trying to place on the European descended peoples who currently inhabit N. America? The fact is they were just as guilty of land theft as the European settlers. You base your argument on the assumption that the last known tribe was the rightful owner.
I was merely demonstrating the absurdity of rewarding some group for the exact same action you attribute to the American settlers just because they were the last indigenous peoples to ‘own’ the land. You can imply a moral argument in favor of whatever you wish but I was clearly not saying that.
So what, we willy-nilly redistribute land to people who have questionable ownership because they were the last known victims? If I stole your car and it was in turn stolen from me does that give me legal rights to your car if it were recovered? Or if I sold your stolen car to someone else does that mean you have lost all legal rights to recover your property because the buyer acted in good faith? Chain of legal custody is essential it would appear.
How do you know if it was even stolen and by whom in the first place without a chain of legal custody? Since you can’t determine from whom it was originally stolen you would yet again be rewarding the last non-European owner’s decedents for a crime that may or may not have been commited.
The witnesses were ‘rubbed out’ anywhere from a hundred to thousands of years ago – and not by the current property owners. A more apt analogy would be you know a liquor store was robbed by a black man so you round up the first black man you see and charge him with the crime because you know all black men are criminals.
Oh, them’s fighting’ words…
And you say my argument is flawed?
The ‘state’ doesn’t exist outside of its members – the state can’t act on its own. Individuals can act in the name of the state, be it the army, settlers or original colonists but they are still individual actions. There is a name for this fallacy but it slips my mind at the moment and I’m much too lazy to look it up.
To what practical end. I think it’s fair to say we are all in agreement that it is impossible to give reparations to the descendants of the Native Americans who were victims of the crimes of our forefathers without making someone suffer for an act they were no part of.
It’s not like there is some grand conspiracy to hide what was done to the Native Americans by the ‘state’ anyway.
The American state also doesn’t have a monopoly on crimes against Native Americans either. The French, British and Spaniards (the short list) also participated in these actions. Is the American state responsible for their crimes due to the fact that they occurred on land that is now part of the US?
If we are to believe in individual responsibility, then we cannot blame “the state” for this. We can only blame the specific agents of the state whom at the time conducted this policy.
If you believe in individual responsibility, you cannot personify the state as a collective anymore than socialists do the market, but have to place relative amounts of responsibility on the different individuals for their different choices.
You contribute to the state by paying taxes and obeying the law. But even if the state is evil, you’re complicit in that evil by cooperating with it. Government agents take this a step further. But obviously, a German postal worker is not responsible for the Holocaust to the same degree as Hitler, just because they’re “government.”
The anarchist categories of “private individuals” and “state” is just as collectivist as the Marxist’s proletarist and bourgeoisie. In both cases, they’re established to create a unified, faceless enemy. But they’re all individuals, even those who work for and run the government.
Well, yeah, the agents of the State ARE the State. The State has no existence outside of those individuals who collectively comprise it. So, yeah, that’s exactly right. I use ‘the State’ as shorthand because typing out ‘those individuals who comprised the State during the period in question’ takes too many keystrokes. Semantics.
Semantics. The State is simply shorthand for the individuals comprising it. The market IS a collective, and so is the State, but there is a huge difference here. The market is millions of individuals making their own decisions based on market mechanisms. It’s bottom up. The State is top down, and ACTS as a collective in matters of policy. Nobody working for the State can contravene its policy arbitrarily or without consequence. You have disagreement, certainly, but it is in the context of an agreement that all will more or less support whatever decisions have been made above their level - or they will resign. The market features nothing like this. So your analogy is inapt.
That’s like saying if a mugger points a gun in my face and I give him my cash, I am complicit in that evil. This is nonsense. Spooner is on point:
[i]t is true that the theory of our Constitution is, that all taxes are paid voluntarily; that our government is a mutual insurance company, voluntarily entered into by the people with each other. . . .
But this theory of our government is wholly different from the practical fact. The fact is that the government, like a highwayman, says to a man: “Your money or your life.” And many, if not most, taxes are paid under the compulsion of that threat.
The government does not, indeed, waylay a man in a lonely place, spring upon him from the roadside, and, holding a pistol to his head, proceed to rifle his pockets. But the robbery is nonetheless a robbery on that account; and it is far more dastardly and shameful.
The highwayman takes solely upon himself the responsibility, danger, and crime of his own act. He does not pretend that he has any rightful claim to your money, or that he intends to use it for your own benefit. He does not pretend to be anything but a robber. He has not acquired impudence enough to profess to be merely a “protector,” and that he takes men’s money against their will, merely to enable him to “protect” those infatuated travellers, who feel perfectly
able to protect themselves, or do not appreciate his peculiar system of protection. He is too sensible a man to make such professions as these.
Furthermore, having taken your money, he leaves you, as you wish him to do. He does not persist in following you on the road, against your will, assuming to be your rightful “sovereign”; on account of the “protection” he affords you. He does not keep “protecting” you, by commanding you to bow down and serve him; by requiring you to do this, and forbidding you to do that; by robbing you of more money as often as he finds it for his interest or pleasure to do so; and by branding you as a rebel, a traitor, and an enemy to your country, and shooting you down without mercy, if you dispute his authority, or resist his demands. He is too much of a gentleman to be guilty of such impostures, and insults, and villainies as these. In short, he does not, in addition to robbing
you attempt to make you either his dupe or his slave.
The proceedings of those robbers and murderers, who call themselves “the government,” are directly the opposite of those of the single highwayman.
Top down enforced collective action is the distinction. I understand that this is not easy to grasp, but there it is. Perhaps this will be easier for you to understand if you think of the State like an organized criminal conspiracy, such as the mafia. This is a perfectly apt analogy because everyone working for it has opted to participate in a violent and anti-social entity which is parasitical in nature.
One person’s effect on aggregate supply through their trade is just as meaningless as one person’s effect on government through democracy.
The government is dominated by political leaders, the economy by business leaders. I have no control over both. I can’t engage in any kind of fair negotiation with either because society recognizes their claims to power as legitimate. So, if in negotiation, I reject any proposal as unfair even if it is truly unequitable, they can simply ignore me and find someone else to accept the deal. It’s my loss.
For you to say the market is “bottom up,” is so absurd because most firms are NOT perfectly competitive and there are a lot of firms that face very little competition. And in general, it is competition which provides the goods that people want at a price which isn’t ridiculously above cost. Furthermore, people arbitrarily contravene government policy all the time: through speeding, evading taxes, and so on.
Aside from government, though, when can I come over and take what is held by another company, without retaliatory violence?
If you have disagreement over who ought to have what (such as the equitability of certain deals), it matters not which side is in the right, because might makes right. The side with greater assets will gain the upper-hand.
You see this right now with the writer’s guilt strike. On the one hand, you have a union of writers who are clearly dissatisfied and have clearly been cheated. On the other hand, you have a union of media companies in an industry that is uncompetitive. The writers have gone on strike and, if it turns out that the media companies can withstand their non-involvement for longer than the unions, they can effectively force all of them to come back to work by making the unions bleed out.
Of course, you see this entire situation as “voluntary,” simply because you believe in the same convoluted definition of voluntary that has led to the discovery that Libertarianism is only consistent is a person can be made a slave through contract.
Not at all. It’s more like a mugger robbing an old lady and you simply watching, doing nothing.
For some reason, you feel some entitlement for people to protect your rights – I ought to sacrifice my own well-being by supporting your economic policies and your property rights. That is, I am obligated to protect your property. Why? I don’t care about your property! It’s yours, not mine! Worry about it yourself!
But when it comes to protecting others’ rights – the countless rights which are not based upon property or may be infringed upon through the religious worship of property – you see no such obligation.
I reject your claim and, as such, I continue to support the government.
If you’re robbed, what do you do? You go to the police. You tell someone. You try and get it back.
Martin Luther King is on point:
He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.
If the government is evil, cooperating with it – even if coerced – is cooperation with evil.
If you are incapable or unwilling to engage in civil disobedience, it is not my responsibility to protect you from evil or uphold your freedom, especially if you can’t even convince 99% of the population that the government actually is evil that taxation actually is theft.
Are you saying that I ought to forsake my own values, for the sake of making myself a slave to your values, which are rather unclear? I think not. I’d rather not be a slave-by-contract.
Top down.
Yes, when was the last time you issued a contract to a large firm that was several hundred pages long?
And, you mean to tell me you’ve never engaged in any kind of transaction where you had regrets, but knew there was no alternative?