Rightfully Stolen Property

Economics Economics Questions
81

Torsten:
This of course also begs the question: Who has got the RIGHT idea concerning property?

Only when given a set of assumptions, definitons, and rules for knowledge creation can determine things to be right or wrong. I’m a bit of a cultural relativist in that sense. Whether or not property rights require some complex bureaucratic framework or simple infrequent usage of an object is just a matter of opinion.

If we base things on ecological reality, then there are no abstract concepts of property rights without them existing in one’s mind. There is only competition between individuals and species (including the possibility of cooperation, and the emergence of complex mental concepts, or other complex behaviors).

Torsten:
What I also find funny is the common assumption that only whites got their property via violence or “taking it away from someone”.

Care to substantiate that claim? :wink: I kid… Native Americans regularly took “property” from each other probably. There were human afterall! Whether they took it from a population who does not fall under the moniker “Native American” is an interesting question. If there was a “pre-Native American” population whose ancestors are still alive, which the current existing lineage dubbed as “Native American” took the land from, then by my definition the pre-N. A. lineage would be the #1 owners. But if we have no knowledge of those events, they would not be the #2 owners as we have no way to verify that history. In other words humans can only determine ownership based on knowledge of that ownership. However, we may determine ownership incorrectly. But that doesn’t make our determination unjust in the practical sense, but it may be unjust in the universal sense.

gotlucky:
Oh yes it does make it unjust. If you witness the murder of a loved one…

Murder of your loved one is not taking your property, it is a different class of crime. In analyzing theft, I am assuming that the property still exists but has undergone a change of possession. The question is about how to understand the concept of ownership.

gotlucky:
If the just owner cannot be found, then the new non-thief owner is the just owner.

Yes, this is what Rothbard states. I am departing from this somewhat. I am not saying that Rothbard defines just ownership incorrectly, I am modifying his definition. I am postulating that there is a type of justice beyond the action of humans. The original just owner is still the absolute just owner, but the new non-thief owner is the practical just owner. I say this, because practical just ownership is more transient in that it can potentially be ended at anytime in the event that the absolute just owner could possibly make a claim and prove it. Furthermore, it still remains for the phrase “cannot be found” as stated in Rothbard and your quote above to be explicitly defined.

(1) Does it mean the finder or judge or somebody else is required to make an attempt to locate the original owner?
(2) Or does in mean the original owner does not exist (e.g. is dead or on another continent, far away beyond the capability of any known reasonable means of finding)?
(3) Or maybe it means that we know the property is stolen, but simply do not know who it was stolen from?

There could be different ways to define it as well. In the current context option #3 seems to be the most reasonable. In this context, any arbitrary person (except the known thief), can take the property. There are still all sorts of logistical questions about how to justly determine the new owner such as: at what point do we does the property actually become unowned? If it is a small material good, such as a watch, does the non-thief possessor of the watch at the time the knowledge of theft comes to light automatically become the new owner? If the property is a large plot of land, how do we determine who has homesteaded it? Say two people arrive there simultaneously and start building fences on opposite sides and then meet… who has the rightful homestead claim? Or does the NAP require them to split the land exaclty according to the status of their fences at the time of meeting (if a voluntary agreement cannot be worked out)?

I don’t expect answers to these questions to be submitted in this thread. But I assume that logic can be used to improve on the current set of rules.

gotlucky:
If he cannot prove it, then the rest of society has no way to know if his claims are true or false.

It doesn’t matter what society knows. Only the truth of history matters in determining absolute justice. If the truth is that the property was stolen, then he is absolutely justified in taking it back but is not necessarily practically justified in doing so. It can be impractical for the truth to be the standard by which we determine justice, we can usually only be practical, which is not necessarily absolute. He may or may not be legally justified depending on the law you analyze his actions under. You may not like my distinction, and that is fine.

My opinion is that human application of the NAP to the best of our abilities defines practical justice. However, those efforts may or may not meet the higher standard of absolute justice. Afterall, how can we have a court system if we do not believe it serves justice? Are we to stop saying “justice was served”, and instead say “the law was carried out”? Even if the law operates to the best of human ability and in line with the NAP?

82

gotlucky:
Well I don’t know how different their conception was. Certainly not all nations had the same conception, as some were nomadic and some were not. The Iroquois had longhouses, which even though they were communal, they were fixed to specific plots of land. Certainly decendants of the Iroquois could make claims to those plots, but the problem is that they are not claiming the plots where the longhouses were located. And certainly after all this time, it is probably impossible to prove where the longhouses were located specifically.

But if they know what land they own, and it is true historically (that it is the specific plot of land they traditionally occupied and used), then they are absolutely justified in taking it back by force. However, they are not practically justified in doing so… they will probably end up dead if they attempt it.

83

I’m part Iroquois by blood (Seneca). I couldn’t trace any specific lineage back to full blooded indians. Couldn’t know what parcels they owned if I did. Couldn’t know the limits or boundaries of such a claim. Any claim would be a collective claim of all relatives of those people. Of which there are a truly great many now as ordinary americans. It’s really not worth pursuing.

84

We can’t say that no valid claims exist because we do not know about them. And if there are valid claims, then it is justified to take the property back by force. If the claim is truly valid, then there is no burden of proof for the retaking by force to be justified. But it is definitely not legally justified to take the property back by force.

But this presents an interesting conundrum… what if the rightful heir of the victim is also the heir of the thief? Wow… I didn’t think of that!

85

I think this is the case for the vast majority of people in your situation.

That said, I think there is great value in really trying to get hold of the magnitude of the crime not so we can self-flagellate with pointless, misguided guilt but so that we can all the more clearly identify the evil of the State. The settlers didn’t steal the land by virtue of their whiteness, they stole it by virtue of the enabling and backing of the US government and Anglo-European money interests. The great-great-…-grandchildren of the very same political Elites who held power at that time are still in power today and it is toward these living, breathing heirs of the colonial plunder of the planet to which our moral condemnation is directed.

Even if there is nothing they can do to right the wrongs that were committed hundreds of years ago, there are a lot of wrongs being committed today which could be righted and, most importantly of all, there is no reason the heirs of this colonial/imperial legacy should be permitted to continue this domination into the future. Moral clarity on this issue is extremely difficult as the very people who we should be criticizing employ all the means at their disposal to befuddle public opinion and discussion on this issue. The problem is insidious but I hope that the LvMI, the Internet, and the “global political awakening” driven in part by cell phones, the Internet, etc. may be building a critical mass to once and for all break the back of this system of blatant exploitation.

Clayton -

86

Well said clayton. My perspective is probably different from everyone else’s here, but I’ll present it anyway…

It’s human nature that needs to change… that is the only way to break the back of the State… as long as humans have the tendency to exploit, exploitation will occur. The State is not the only avenue of exploitation. It’s the tenency to exploit that is the root problem. It’s like guns. Guns aren’t the problem, it’s the tendency of people to use them irresponsibly that is.

Rather than teaching people to criticize the State, we need to teach them to criticise their own individual actions and how they result in harm to others (some of which is through the State, but not all).

87

The underlying principle of justice is the same. Murder and theft are both unjust. If the victim (or family of the victim in the case of murder) were to take action against the criminal, so long as they do not exceed the principle of proportionality, their actions are just in accordance with libertarianism and the NAP. If they cannot prove to the rest of society that their actions were just, that does not change the justness of their actions, only what other’s opinions may be about their actions.

There is no sense of justice beyond the actions of humans. Justice requires human actions. It is subjective.

No. For the original just owner to be an owner of the property in question, there must be a claim to the property in question. Otherwise he is just claiming to own some idea or concept of what his property is. If I lose my wallet, I can still call it my wallet, and we all will know what I am talking about. But where is this wallet? What if it gets destroyed? Is it still my wallet? No, it doesn’t exist. When I continue to talk of my wallet, I am not talking about it as an actual owned possession, I am talking about the concept of my wallet as my owned possession.

This is what is happening even if the property in question is not destroyed. When Native Americans talk about their stolen land, they are talking about the concept of land that was stolen from them. They are not referring to any actual plot of land that exists. In this case, it is slightly different than the wallet example, as the wallet is still a concrete idea, and not an abstraction. But in the case of land theft, the Native Americans are talking about some abstract land property, and that really doesn’t do us any good in determining what they are supposed to be owners of.

I already answered this. Why are you bringing this up again?

It might mean this in context of some certain scenario. But more generally, what it really means is “the owner cannot be found”.

This is quite rare, as the only way to know if something has been stolen is if there is evidence or a confession, and how exactly are you going to know if some watch on some person’s wrist is stolen? Quite rare.

The property is unowned when no one makes a claim to own it.

Does the new non-thief possessor make a claim to own the watch? If yes, then yes. If no, then no.

Fencing in land does not necessarily equal homesteading it. It depends upon the norms of the society. It might be that you can fence in land large enough for you to build a modest house, while you would not be able to fence in miles of land in order to claim a city. Norms are very important.

Let’s stick with the common and well understood terms of justified according to some ethic (such as the NAP) and legally justified. He might be justified according to the NAP but not according to the law. There is no reason to complicate things by throwing in terms that no one else is familiar with.

Clayton is probably better equipped to deal with this assertion. He’s written about this somewhere on the forum.

You are clearly using the word justice differently from most people. Something is either just or it isn’t (according to some ethic, such as the NAP). If there is an unjust outcome in libertopia, the law was not “practically just”, it was unjust. Period. The aim is for the law to be as close as possible to the NAP, and that as a result, injustice would be at a minimum. If you want to continue using your idea of “practical justice”, you should be aware that you will turn off many people the way Ayn Rand turned off many people in her zealous use of the word “greed”. People just don’t use the word that way, and if you start saying that unjust outcomes are just, then even if that is not what you really mean, people will just shake their heads.

88

Again, this can all be simplified by using terms as people commonly understand them. If the Native Americans knew which land they owned (specifically which plots), then they would be justified in accordance with the NAP. However, they would not be justified in accordance with the law of America.

89

The burden of proof is required for the rest of society. If you know you are justified in whatever actions you are going to take, but you cannot prove it to society, then if you go ahead and take those actions, you are risking punishment from society, however unjust that punishment might be. This is not a failing of libertarian justice, this is a “failing” of reality. Life is not perfect. Shit happens. It sucks.

90

I am attempting to be “objective” and trying to understand ownership in terms of an objective history of real events (the timeline of actions that have actually occured as opposed to our knowledge of them) which form the basis for determining objective justice which is distinct from what humans think of as justice, and I’m probably failing — I’ll blame subjective language. I’m not claiming that in a given real situation, we can determine what that objective justice is. I’m saying that, given an assumed real history, we can use logic to determine what that objective justice would exact.

Objective just ownership is only dependent upon the existence of the owner, the existence of the property, and the objective application of objective rules based on the NAP. Of course, this has no bearing in subjective reality.

I have many qualms with your last long reply, but will not ask further questions. I am satisfied that I have at least been shown Rothbard’s answer. This gives me a better footing to work from.

I’m sure I will come back to it or start another thread with a new question.

I sincerely thank you (and all who replied) for engaging in this for so long! I really learned alot! Cheers!

91

I highly suggest you read about objective vs subjective, abstract vs concrete, and positive vs normative. There is no such thing as objective justice or morality. They are entirely subjective. If there were such a thing as “objective justice” or “objective morality”, we would have no way of discerning what they are, as there is no way to derive an ought from an is.

92

You are misunderstanding. I mean objective in a mathematical sense. That we define a set of objective rules based on the NAP and whatever assumptions are necessary to logically deduct from them. These rules then define objective justice. It is our inability to have complete knowledge of the world that makes it impossible to determine what is, in reality, objectively just according to these rules.

93

Ad usum principle seems to apply. It’s kind of the oxygene your breath. Can you claim all the oxygene as your property?
Here is a piece on Southern Africa, where you suddenly get similar problems:

94

oxygen is a resource of a different nature. One might rightfully claim some reasonable airspace around their body… we usually call this personal space. But it is not tied to specific oxygen molecules as we can’t control their movement. Same thing with ocean. You can’t claim the actual water molecules, but you can claim a body bounded by lat/long coords or relative to the sea floor below. Land is substantially different. It still changes, so we can’t truly claim specific molecules. For example, an Earthquake may move the land causing one persons land to grow and anothers to shrink (plenty of other natural processes uncontrolled by man can cause “earth molecules” to move from one plot to another). Are we to not readjust the fences relative to, say, lat/long coords? I’m not sure what the NAP would say about this.

We must be careful in what we say… someone mentioned something about the Africans who were “returned” “their” land squandered it. This contains the symptoms of an interpersonal utility judgment. They may have produced less crops, or changed the land in a what you see unfit, but it is impossible to say whether or not they used it worse or better. They may have gotten quite alot of satisfaction out of their “squandering”.

The above article says that people do not own property without having a concept of property ownership. Property is derived from human action. It is not conditional on the human having a particular worldview. It has all sorts of insulting insinuations… unanswered questions which cannot be viewed properly outside of the deeper context of history. Of course, we can’t dispute that Africans (and other native peoples), were less advanced in terms of technology and knowledge (generally speaking)… I’m sure they knew things that the settlers didn’t. But again, how can we make interpersonal comparisons like that? A lower level of knowledge may easily generate a higher level of satisfaction! It depends on the person, and we can’t compare between persons.

Of course you could argue that they have to be a member of a race that has a property ownership concept… say a mentally challenged individual can own land as long as they are of… European descent, for example. But a mentally challenged tribal African would have no property rights, even if they were physically capable of “homesteading”.

But is the line drawn at race, nation, or some other social or geographical distinction? Were there any of the African race that did have some (maybe rudimentary) concept of property rights?

95

The evil of the state is no more than the evil of the human heart. The state is run by people; so look within. People cannot be trusted to rule other people. That doesn’t mean you couldn’t create a state where people control only themselves, one predicated on individualism not socialism. That’s why I have trouble blanket condemning the state. Not that I can really blame you since an individualist state hasn’t yet existed except as a concept… but if it did it would be a moral entity. Probably it would not be right to even use the same word ‘state’ for both of them.

True, generally the colonists of the time lived amicably, and dealt fairly with the indians. It was the governments that did some truly two-faced things regarding the indians.

That’s where we differ, you and I. You still believe that such a ‘global political awakening’ might eventually occur and thus direct your efforts and hopes there. I don’t think it will ever happen. The powers that be have taken over the organs of teaching and communication precisely to keep this from happening, and they have a billion times more momentum than we do.

This hope of an awakening also gets driven by personal bias. It’s a bit funny and sad to read you saying the same thing that libertarians like Robert LeFevre said in the 70’s, some 40 years ago, who also stated that he thought the world was waking up to these ideas. When we personally have political awakening, it seems to us that the overall zeitgeist itself may be shifting. But this ends up being false.

How long are you willing to wait? He and others like him waited their whole lives and died waiting. I will wait no longer.

I offer Plan B: to walk away and actually build a new society based on libertarian values. That will garner more press and worldwide attention than a million articles on Mises.org. We sit around debating the Austrian business cycle theory–we should be showing what an Austrian-economy looks like. We theorize about legal systems predicated on voluntaryism and the NAP, we should be showing running court systems dealing with problems in real time.

I’m serious about this.

If you really want to convert someone to libertarianism, you could educate them in its ways, pain-stakingly, over a period of years. OR, you could drop them into a libertarian society and let them see the results of our ideas with their own eyes and convert them in a day.

Nothing changes until we do this thing I suggest. We will always be marginalized politically without action in this direction.

If we can show the world Plan B, survive, thrive, and prosper, and begin outcompeting the world, begin brain-draining the world, then we can force the world to change and acknowledge our ideas as superior. The United States did the same thing. Single-handedly converted the world to republican democracies or thereabouts. Monarchy fell to the idea of the democratic republic, beginning with the US and its success.

I want to do an analogous thing, but with libertarianism. We know it would work.

96

Have you read anything by Sowell regarding Cosmic Justice?

THE QUEST FOR COSMIC JUSTICE
by Thomas Sowell

97

Thanks for the link. I’m not suggesting we waste our time trying to pursue perfect cosmic justice. I’m just suggesting that it exists, given a specific set of assumptions on exactly what it is. And if we define our logical rules appropriately, then under a given set of assumptions of history, we can logically determine what is “cosmically” just. Of course, in reality, we can’t know what it would be since our knowledge of history is imperfect, even if our ability to apply the logical rules of cosmic justice was perfect.

98

*shrug - there’s FSP, seasteading, (Chile?), etc. for those interested in that strategy. Or start your own. I don’t believe this strategy can work because once you nail down a territory and say “here we stand”, you’ve just painted a bullseye on your chest and the moment you start having any meaningful success, you will be causing the political Elites pain and they will come and grind you to powder.

If you want to speak practically, I think the only practical escape is … money, lots of it. That’s really the only way to have “liberty in your lifetime”. As far as changing society goes, I don’t believe anyone can actually change it. It’s like the motion of the stars, all you can do is look and observe. It does what it decides to do. Even the most powerful people in the world can barely bump the needle this way or that way and they lose as many steps as they gain in the pursuit of their pet Utopia.

That said, Bacon’s quote holds in the realm of social phenomena - Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. If you understand the laws of the social order, you are in a position to identify major imbalances which are ripe for exploitation by a new idea. Implanting the right idea at the right place at the right time can unleash tremendous social inertia, like removing the last pebble holding back a landslide. I think the Ron Paul movement illustrates this, to a degree.

Clayton -

99

How would I be causing them pain exactly?

If you look at Sealand, they’ve had trouble with the authorities, yet have been largely left alone.

I expect it will go something like this. It starts out as little more than a curiosity. Makes a little news, w/e. Permanent living off the CA coast with industry, a tiny economy, etc. It becomes known as being libertarian, grows. The point where the elites would be mad is after critical mass is achieved, when mainstream people are moving there en masse.

It’s pretty much too late at that point.

The most they could do would be to force us from 15 miles off coast to 150 miles off coast. Wouldn’t matter by the point.

The two danger points are the initial establishment, and the critical mass portion. I expect the authorities will laugh me off until it’s too late to do anything about us. Heck, they’ll probably think we’re doing them a favor, attracting away all the libertarians and the like.

Unfortunately that changes nothing for everyone else.

Disruption overturns whole industries. I intend to disrupt modern politics. Foot voting can achieve much. If we can break a million residents by the end of my lifetime, it’s established permanently.

Sure. I’m willing to gamble this is a receptive historical epoch to the idea :slight_smile: The US grew massively while Europe was completely distracted with its own problems. With the US about to be embroiled in massive debt, and still active around the world in defense/war actions, they may not respond to a cut little offshore community before it’s too far established to counter.

We shall see :slight_smile: