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Friday, August 26, 2005 - 6:19amSanction this postReply
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The concept of ownership I believe to be a natural cultural conditioning which occurred over time and we now just take it for granted since, in our world, this is how it has always been. Somehow this custom or practice had not developed in a number of Native American societies and they used the land, more or less, as an open resource - owned by none, shared by all. Obviously, we can't lump them all together as playing on the same "team" and employing the same (or similar) systems, values and philosophies. Perhaps it is naive, and somewhat nostalgic of me, but I like the quality of the idea of living off the land, making of it what you will, and moving on when needs must. Sadly, the world today has lost nearly all its innocence. Overall, Mr. Speaker, it is a lucid and well written article and I commend it to the house (In other words "Me bigs it up like - boo ya cha' big style!").

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Friday, August 26, 2005 - 8:22amSanction this postReply
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Excellent summary tying concepts of property rights into the European/native-American conflicts. A couple others on a recent thread have also made valiant attempts to oppose both the simplistic leftist approach that apologizes for European presence, and the simplistic oft-Objectivist approach of automatically cheering on white man vs. the savages. Your article is one of the best I've seen of covering the - IMO correct - middle ground. Sanction.


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Friday, August 26, 2005 - 8:33amSanction this postReply
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I thought we DID own the moon?!?!?!?

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Friday, August 26, 2005 - 10:37amSanction this postReply
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If anybody owns the moon, it ought to be Armstrong and Aldrin. They were the first men there, after all.

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Friday, August 26, 2005 - 1:38pmSanction this postReply
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Great, articulate article, Mark.

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Friday, August 26, 2005 - 3:21pmSanction this postReply
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Thanks Aaron and Jon for your kind words about this article.

I'd like to suggest to Daniel Mauer that private property rights are a requirement of human survival and flourishing, rather than a custom that has value only relative to the ethos of some particular culture.

People are moral agents, because they are, by nature, beings of volitional consciousness. As such, they survive and flourish by thinking and trying to make appropriate choices. To the extent that they make good chocies, they tend to live well and happily. To the extent that they make poor choices, they suffer frustration and disappointment.

People require private property to survive as human beings, because it provides them with a sphere of moral autonomy within which they have the freedom to make the choices and implement the long range plans that affect the character of their lives, for better or worse.  Take away the right of private property, and the physical objects or land that had been privately owned might (temporarily) remain in place. However, when coercively deprived of the right of private ownership, people lose the freedom to think, which they need to live. For the freedom to think is useless unless one has the freedom to act on one's ideas. And one can't act on one's ideas without private property, because one must first seek permission to act from another--permission that may not be forthcoming.

A such, private property is a right that people have by virtue of the requirements of their nature. It is their right, because it is natural to them. Systems and cultures that denigrate and destroy private property are unnatural...and unhappy.


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Friday, August 26, 2005 - 5:18pmSanction this postReply
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Hi Mark.

In your assertion that -

"private property rights are a requirement of human survival and flourishing, rather than a custom that has value only relative to the ethos of some particular culture" -
I don't know, I can't quite swallow it as an "absolute" premise. There are always varying degrees of quality that can be factored in and I wouldn't say that having a yard with a picket fence around it necessarily induces "survival and flourishing" but I can see your argument. The romantic ideal of the the world as an open playing field exists, I know, it's just that in some places it's "keep off the grass".

People are moral agents, I agree, but those who make the right choices in life, or more right choices than wrong choices, I don't feel are always better informed. Perhaps they are better in their intuition, foresight or even guesswork. Some of the greatest minds in the world have died in a gutter where many an asshole has died between silk sheets.

Overall, I agree with what you say. But don't you think that the world is getting smaller in some ways? And, at least in my life, every decision I make is not always the best one. Though, I try.

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Sunday, August 28, 2005 - 8:02amSanction this postReply
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Nice article.  However  you are leaving out the hundreds of examples of Indians recognizing the 'new order' of property rights, signing treaties that reserved for them certain properties, only to have a bunch of settlers move to that land.  The Indians were then faced with two choices fight or negotiate.  If they fought to kick the settlers off their land, they were portrayed as evil savages massacring whites, not as legal property owners excercising their right against tresspass, and the Army massacred them.  When they tried to negotiate or settle the arguments in courts or with governments, the settlers were deemed to be too numerous or too established to move, and lands Indians won by treaty were whittled away each time the whites saw a valley they liked.

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Monday, August 29, 2005 - 2:51pmSanction this postReply
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Robert, you make a good point about the unfairness of white violations of Indian treaties, which violations were always resolved by shrinking the boundaries of the reservations, or by moving the reservations elsewhere. But my point is that the whole notion of assigning collective property rights to tribes (or to anyone else) is unfair, in that doing so necessarily violates and obstructs authentic rights to private property, which are earned by individuals.

The same insight can be applied to the western lands empire, consisting of several millions of square miles of unused territory in the American West, all controlled by the US federal government in the name of "public ownership".  


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Monday, August 29, 2005 - 2:58pmSanction this postReply
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Hi Daniel. If I can make a suggestion without being obnoxious, you might find it profitable to get a copy of The Ethics of Liberty by Tibor Machan, available in paper back from the Foundation for Economic Education, or from Laissez Faire Books. The book was compiled from Professor Machan's lectures abroad about the source and nature of ethics and individual rights, from which private property rights are logically derived. I make this suggestion only because I appreciate that it is sometimes difficult to translate abstract broad philosophical principles that one may not be familiar with to the circumstances of daily living. The principle just doesn't seem real enough. The book referenced above is brief--less than 150 pages, and very clear.

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Monday, August 29, 2005 - 4:52pmSanction this postReply
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I haven't found such a book. Do you mean The Ethics of Liberty by Murray Rothbard (an excellent work I would highly recommend in any case) ? Or some other work by Machan such as Individuals and Their Rights (which sounds promising) ?

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Tuesday, August 30, 2005 - 6:59amSanction this postReply
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Mark,

But my point is that the whole notion of assigning collective property rights to tribes (or to anyone else) is unfair, in that doing so necessarily violates and obstructs authentic rights to private property, which are earned by individuals.

I understand the larger point you are making and it is, of course, correct.  But if that was the thrust of your essay, you did your case an injustice by facilely dismissing the Indians as prehistoric savages who did not understand private property.  I would also like to see a larger explanation of how you are using the word tribe.  It can mean nation, e.g., Iroquois Nation.  Surely you wouldn't consider the Aztecs or Incas tribes.  There were Indian governments, most were primitive but some, especially in the eastern US, were remarkably sophisticated.


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Tuesday, August 30, 2005 - 8:23amSanction this postReply
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Mark -

I sit poised until Aaron's question is answered. Which is it?

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Thursday, September 1, 2005 - 8:56pmSanction this postReply
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Aaron and Daniel, the title to the book compiled of Machan's lectures abroad is The Virtue of Liberty, not the Ethics.... Sorry about the mistake. I bought several copies from FEE a few years ago; I assume they still distribute this great introduction to the subject of moral values and individual rights. This book helped me to clear up my confusion about this subject after years of fogginess about it.

Robert, I confess to a lot of ignorance about the tribal cultures across the continent. I know a little about western tribes, but that's it. My objective was to challenge the notion that Indians owned the North American continent by virtue of the fact that "they were here first", as political fashionatas proclaim. But I also wanted to emphasize that many of the western tribes really were savage and primitive, contrary to the misty Rousseauian depiction of the primitive or savage as "noble".

On the other hand, American commentators in the 19th century were often condescending toward the Indians. These commentators believed that the Indians were less than human, incapable of leading civilized lives, competant only to roam with and hunt the wild beasts of prairie and forest. The "civilized" and the "compassionate" (self described) realized Indians needed to be herded onto reservations. I just the other day stumbled on such a comment in The Fur Trade of the American West by Crittendin (spelling?) who wrote around the turn of the century and was considered a leading authority. In fact, Thomas Jefferson wrote somewhere that all the lands west of the Mississippi River should be turned into a wild Injun theme park.

I don't doubt that some tribes were more intellectally developed and civilized than others. Even in the Far West, some tribes were professional cutthroats and marauders, and some were meek farmers and hunters. Some, like the Nez perce, seemed to have more brains and facility for trade. But of course, Indians possessed all of the potential for self improvement, or for savegery, that is characteristic of volitional beings.

Incidentally, there's a fun book that was a best seller a few years ago, entitled Tough Trip Through Paradise by Andrew Garcia. This is Garcia's memoirs of his days living with Indians in Montana in the 1880's. He was an untutored kid with a knack for attracting women ( a self described squaw man) and a rare talent for seeing and describing people. He had almost no schooling, yet despite his ubiquitous grammatical errors and run-on sentences, Garcia could write. And boy, does he have adventures to tell! I recommend this book highly!


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