Also, in reference to your “type 1” definition: We probably can establish a certain “logic of success” as it were, but that’s a little bit of a different story
As gotlucky drawned attetion to earlier, the thief in this case would be the legal owner. It’s certain that some of the property that US citizens have today are not rightful, because they are the right of the native’s heirs. But even if they knew how to prove it, probably they don’t even know what is their rightful property and what isn’t. As you said below your post with the first and second types. They would be rightful ownership and legal ownership.
I guess that is true, but you have to consider that, normally, the rightful owner is the one who can prove that his property is in fact his, not the other way around.
Ok, these last few replies, I find more satisfactory. Vive-la-insurrection hit it from the intellectual explanation perspective pretty clearly (maybe others have earlier as well), but I think it is important to explain it in terms of basic language and the actual reality we live in,
It’s certain that some of the property that US citizens have today are not rightful, because they are the right of the native’s heirs.
This is one point I am trying to make, but I’m not sure how many people here actually believe this. In studying history, it seems reasonable to recognize that at least some land was stolen from Native Americans and therefore at least some legal property is not rightful property (not just land but whatever is derived from that land as well).
So how can one ever claim rightful ownership of land which is legally owned? I do not find it satisfactory that the nonexistence of a challenge to that rightful ownership is the sole requirement. I think that rightful ownership can never be proven in the absolute sense. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, just that any claim of it is ultimately questionable.
Here’s my take:
Stolen property can become rightful property if the original owner’s lineage dies out, or surpasses some generational threshold (not sure what I would take it to be, something long, say 100 generations). But it depends on the effort made by the victim to reclaim the property. Say if the victim lineage has relevant historical records and makes effort to reclaim that property, then the thief can never have rightful ownership, even after 1,000,000 generations, so long as the victim lineage still possesses records and pursues the case. Once the victim lineage dies out, then the thief becomes the rightful owner, as a voluntary exchange is no longer possible with the original rightful owner. As I mentioned earlier, it is because the thief exerted effort to maintain the property, so another citizen can not lay a greater claim to the thief’s spoils.
I’m not arguing this to be legal property only. I am actually arguing it to be rightful property in the libertarian sense as well. Dead individuals can never have rightful property (unless of course, they left it as inheritance to another lineage). So we must define where “natural inheritance” stops… i.e. that by birthright.
To counter this must mean one to stop using any claim of rightful property. How can you prove that your car doesn’t have any theft in its history? Say part of the metal was extracted from land stolen from Native Americans… this is a real possibility, but it may be impractical to prove it one way or the other. So one can only claim legal ownership, or practical ownership… say giving a probability of rightful ownership. Although I am near 100% certain, that whatever property you own, somewhere in it’s history (the history of the matter it is made of), there is violence.
Now there is still the question of land vs material goods created form resources extracted from the land. As I think the two types of property are treated differently, at least by Rothbard. I would argue it doesn’t matter… all property ultimately comes from land. So turning the resources extracted from that land into something does not create rightful ownership. It does add to the weight of any possible claim of rightful ownership once the original lineage dies out though.
QFT.
Deeds are just a formal way of demonstrating who is the legal owner. They become necessary regarding valuable properties in a large society, as it is impossible for everyone to know who has a legal claim to what. They are unnecessary in small communities where this sort of information is common knowledge.
There are two different types of ownership, legal ownership and just ownership. As far as I am concerned, a thief can never become a just owner of the property he has stolen. The reason I am pushing the point of needing specific claims and proof is because of the scenario you have set up for us to examine. Even if there are rightful owners of the stolen land, these owners have to provide specific claims and proof. If they cannot, then we, the rest of society, have no idea if these claims are truthful claims.
Thieves cannot be rightful owners of the stolen property.
Rightful ownership is an opinion, it is not absolute. There are people who do not even believe in ownership (even if they demonstrate ownership).
No. I am not saying this. You have stolen it. You can never be the rightful owner.
This is incorrect. Rightful owners need not be the first user. That is one method of acquiring rightful ownership.
Make it simpler and just call these “practical rightful owners” legal owners. That is what they are. We are concerned with actual rightful owners, or we wouldn’t be libertarians. If all we cared about was legal ownership, then whatever the state says is what we ought to care about.
This is actually correct. Property rights are entirely about what the community/society assigns. But as libertarians, we want the community’s/society’s notion of property rights to align with the libertarian notion of just property rights.
Be precise with your use of words here. In this scenario, you wouldn’t be the rightful owner, you’d be the legal owner, but the rightful owner would still be the one the car was taken from. In moral terms, you’d have no right to the car, even if your ownership was societally recognized.
The biggest issue is perhaps that the american indians, as hunter-gatherer types generally, didn’t have a concept of property in the way that we do.
Lastly, iirc, they signed treaties with the US that should put all previous legal issues about land to rest. They have sovereignty on their reservations and forfeit original claim to any land outside it. I could perhaps be wrong there, don’t want to research it.
In a moral sense, they have been greatly wronged historically. In a legal sense, they signed away their rights via treaty.
*Disclosure: I am myself in part American Indian.
My take on aboriginal property is that beyond actual settlements (which existed amongst tribes that knew agriculture), the claims of property cannot be construed as falling on the actual land but on the resources being controlled, i.e. the animals hunted and the plants etc. from which food was gathered. Thus, most of this property was simply abandoned either through migration (including hunter-gatherers settling into agriculture) or the practical disappearance of tribes altogether (mostly by disease). This does not mean that there were not clear instances of theft, but when you consider the sheer magnitude of the North American continent, these crimes were not the general practice (though still egregious).
So once property has been stolen, there can never be a new rightful owner, only a new legal owner?
No. There can be a new rightful owner, just not the thief. Once property becomes unowned, it may be homesteaded by a new person. That person will be the rightful owner.
Libertarians typically subscribe to John Locke’s view on the emergence of property, so the burden of proof would be on the scions of Native Americans to prove that their ancestors “mixed their labor with unclaimed land (i.e. homesteaded land)”. As gotlucky has indicated, the issue becomes extremely complicated once we move beyond the superficial statement of “Native Americans should have their property restored” into the very exacting question, “What, specifically, is the property that must be restored and what evidence do you have that it is their property?”.
My take on aboriginal property is that beyond actual settlements (which existed amongst tribes that knew agriculture), the claims of property cannot be construed as falling on the actual land but on the resources being controlled, i.e. the animals hunted and the plants etc. from which food was gathered. Thus, most of this property was simply abandoned either through migration (including hunter-gatherers settling into agriculture) or the practical disappearance of tribes altogether (mostly by disease). This does not mean that there were not clear instances of theft, but when you consider the sheer magnitude of the North American continent, these crimes were not the general practice (though still egregious).
This is an interesting perspective. I’ve also heard it argue that Native Americans did not view land as property and therefore we can’t claim that it was stolen. I don’t really buy it because use of land confers a type of ownership to me, regardless of the person’s concept of ownership. Also, treaties may have been signed, but I think coercion was probably used. And the treaties were probably violated by the US. I may be biased, because I don’t think I can be convinced that Native Americans voluntarily gave up their land.
My point is to assume it was stolen, then try to understand the rightful ownership issue. The point is that legal ownership is not the same thing as rightful ownership. And that some things we think we are the rightful owners of may not actually be the case because of the history of violence attached to that property. And in order to resolve that, we have to adjust our definition of rightful property to at least allow to transfer after death of the victim lineage.
No. There can be a new rightful owner, just not the thief. Once property becomes unowned, it may be homesteaded by a new person. That person will be the rightful owner.
Why can’t the thief homestead it? So someone else has to appropriate it from the thief? or we just have to wait until the thief dies? How is someone supposed to know it was stolen? What if someone steals it from the thief thinking the thief is the rightful owner, is that ok?
If it becomes unowned, the thief can homestead it, but I doubt any libertarian would consider the thief the rightful owner. For objects that have never been owned, first use is one of the criteria to make it rightfully owned (the other is that the homesteader makes a claim to own it, as he could just pick a berry off a bush and never come back to it).
If an object is currently unowned but has been owned previously, then we have one more criterion: the new owner cannot have acquired it unjustly (i.e. stolen it). So the thief could be a first user if it were to become unowned, but unless the rightful owner gives his blessing to the thief, the thief can never rightfully own it.
Obviously, it is possible that other libertarians may disagree with this viewpoint. But I don’t think that a just theory of property can allow for people to acquire property through unjust means. It seems contradictory.
Anybody would be a better owner than the thief, in my opinion (I think Rothbard makes a similar point somewhere, probably in FaNL or EoL). But really, the rightful owner is the person the thief stole it from. Ideally, the property would make its way back to the rightful owner. Barring that, anybody else would be a better owner.
No one can necessarily know, though it might be possible in certain contexts. I’ll try to find what Rothbard wrote about this, as iirc, what he wrote seemed to make sense when I read it.
Sure, why not? After all, he’s taking it from an unjust owner. That doesn’t mean that I can respect the second thief.
So, chapter nine in the Ethics of Liberty is entirely relevant to this thread. I suggest that you read the whole chapter (or even the whole book), but I will quote the most relevant portion:
But there is far more before and after this portion, and it is even better when read in context. So I highly suggest reading the entire chapter.
First, not all land was in use before the arrivals of Europeans. Second, much of that which was in use for hunting and gathering was abandoned (due to the reasons I discussed in the previous post). For these reasons it really does not make sense to assume that such an enormous amount of land was ‘stolen’ (if we can count land as actual property at all). Even that property which was stolen need not be put back into the control of the heirs of those who once used it, since - as I argued - the ownership was actually over the animals and plants on the land, not the actual land itself, and how many modern heirs would be making use of those, even if they still existed? I.e. they would become abandoned anyway.
thanks gotlucky for digging that up! I had read some Rothbard stuff about first user, and knew that solved some of it, but the above passage pretty much touched on all the possible scenarios!
But I think it is still important to note that “just ownership” is a sort of assumed concept. It may or may not be able to be proven either way. So the true rightful owner may be different than who we are allowed to reasonably assume is the rightful owner. This is an important distinction.
So while smith may be reasonable in assuming that jones is the rightful owner of your stolen watch, it doesn’t make jones the rightful owner. In this way, it is almost impossible to know who the true rightful owner of anything is. We simply have no choice but to work with legal ownership rather than absoltue rightful ownership.
I think part of the problem is that the encroaching Europeans did not comprehend - in large part as a result of a convenient obtuseness - the concept of “ancestral lands”, a situation where neighboring tribes reached a pseudo-territorial equilibrium that minimized incursions into each other’s hunting grounds, even though much of the land was unoccupied at any given time.
Plus, I don’t think it can be stressed enough that when people can do something, they will, however unjustifiable it may be. The experiences of the Trekboers in South Africa are highly analogous to those experienced by American pioneers. In both cases, there was a lot of sanctimonious justification of rapine combined with habitual playing of the martyr.
Clayton -
Right, just ownership is a subjective concept. Not everyone shares the libertarian belief about justly owned property (and even if they did, that would make it universal, not necessarily objective). But I think that most people who support the NAP (i.e. libertarians) would most likely agree with Rothbard’s position on this issue.
Not knowing who is the rightful owner is another way of saying that no one is making a claim to the object in question. For example, if you drop a $20 on the street, you would be the rightful owner. But it is lost to you. No one knows that it belongs to you, and hell, you don’t even know where it is, so there is no way for you to make a claim that it is yours. At this point, it is unowned. No one is making a claim to own the $20. Whoever uses it next becomes the rightful owner.
Ideally just ownership would equal legal ownership. Practically, we have to work with legal ownership. But people do bring lawsuits today about who is the rightful owner of X, but whatever the judge decides is who becomes the legal owner, regardless of just ownership. But we can know who the rightful owner is most of the time. As Rothbard pointed out, and I said right above, when we cannot identify the rightful owner, this is another way of saying that nobody is claiming the object in question. So, the next user is the rightful owner - unless, of course, he acquired it unjustly (i.e. he stole it).
Gotlucky
This is also what I am wondering about in this kind of debate. The factoid of “stolen land” is usually just insinuated for propaganda purposes. And if you try to establish potential previous ownership rationally, this gets blocked out the debate. I am just to familiar with these allegation here in South Africa (Whites supposedly “stole” the land of Black). And it usually is just innuendo, in the few serious cases were Blacks have been removed from land under the previous administration, they either didn’t own it or they were compensated for this. That doesn’t prevent protocommunist politicians from utilizing such claims in their rhetoric and of course they find some liberals whining together with them. The reality however is that Whites as a norm either homesteaded land or where applicable negotiated with neighbouring chieftains about borders of land. The British of course conquered piece by piece of what today is called South Africa, but they didn’t change that much in terms of private ownership of land, at least not directly.