Every piece of land on the face of the earth was seized by force once upon a time. At some point don’t the conquered peoples/cultures/governments objections need to be ignored and the best course of action is that we need to just accept it and move on?
Do we still need to be sensitive about the Akkadians and how their land was taken and changed hands a dozen or more times over the last 4000 years?
I agree, this like most of our political questions is a matter of force, not non-aggression principle. And while force makes sense to most of the "muh guns, muh house" types that hitler on wheels is preaching to, there is plenty of time and money spent on our national mythos and our "divine providence" being the "gift" of land. When we know that was just not the case.
To grant this conception of property rights value, we must excuse not only the original sin of theft, but quite a bit more than that:
The land was deliberately taken by force from the original occupants who were in use of it at the time, the subsequent labor force (black people) that cultivated huge swathes of it and never tasted the fruits of their labor, once black people were "freed" were often put back to work as renters or "squatters" on the land and in the same hovels that they had been forced to live in prior. To the extent that property rights were "respected" at pretty much any point in history the terms and conditions were exclusively defined and enforced by the rich and powerful. The philosophical underpinnings are only in service of the power structure already in place. To the extent that those things changed, it was people that demanded the state re-distribute this bounty to a more just and equal end against the protestations of the rich who claimed this was "theft" of the "fruits of their labor." Which is such a distortion of both terms that it is worth revisiting.
The concept of "property rights" in the US is based upon Locke and it is supposed to give this real philosophical sheen, but his formulation of "life, liberty, and property" did not make it in to the Constitution because that ideas has some unfortunate byproducts:
"Though the earth, and all inferiour creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person: this nobody has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his."
but if we talk about who gets to have the land to begin with then that is a little more complicated. Even the freak libertarians acknowledge this problem as being unfair:
For example, economist Murray Rothbard stated (in Man, Economy, and State):
"If Columbus lands on a new continent, is it legitimate for him to proclaim all the new continent his own, or even that sector 'as far as his eye can see'? Clearly, this would not be the case in the free society that we are postulating. Columbus or Crusoe would have to use the land, to 'cultivate' it in some way, before he could be asserted to own it.... If there is more land than can be used by a limited labor supply, then the unused land must simply remain unowned until a first user arrives on the scene. Any attempt to claim a new resource that someone does not use would have to be considered invasive of the property right of whoever the first user will turn out to be."
But this is also absurd on its face, because it is just force all the way down...(Who gets to get to the land? When do I get to begin enforcing my rights? Can I elbow someone on the way to the land I want?) and with all of that largely unremarked upon or hand waved away, what do we really have here? Another hint that our property rights might not be very fair is the very much intended and very specific hereditary rules of inheritance property rights which obviously exclude many generations to come from ever being able to own land without their own violent conquest or a democracy deciding that property rights based on feudal ideas might need some updating.
So, to my mind, you are right Pete. We should acknowledge that property rights are the spoils of war.
We should stop pretending that they have any sort of justice to them.
To the extent that sys and others are arguing that property rights are a foundational precursor to society and without them there would be uncontrolled vigilante justice by the strong against the weak--It is worth remembering that they are the ones that reject the state exercising due process on behalf of both parties and want to get straight to shooting.
