Originally posted by @wajoma
You're off on another subject, otherwise known as diversion. Not all land was taken by wealthy folk, not all land was taken full stop, some land has been taken and retaken, unless you have some specific record of who owns what where it means nothing. It's part of history. Got some specifics, names places, surveys by all means go for it.
Don't try and j ...[text shortened]... ue not the wealth non-wealth of those who engage it's force under the cop out,"Hey, it's legal".
Not all US land was originally taken by wealthy people. Many settlers in the 16th to the 18th Centuries had next to nothing. But I never said it was. I said something different. Let's try it again:
"If you investigate the origins of land ownership you will be surprised how often it originates in taking land from other people, how much is transferred through inheritance, and how little of its value is in any remote way attributable to the efforts of the owner. The privatisation of land once in common ownership, as in Britain's land clearances or the USA's genocide of native Americans..."
As you say, "unless you have some specific record of who owns what where it means nothing. " In other words, the (classical) Liberal concept of private property requires a public system to map and register land ownership, supported by a legal structure to secure ownership. Of course, native Americans who did not map and register ownership and who did not accept the principle of private ownership for land had utterly different values of common or shared stewardship of land and its resources. So when you say "not all land was taken full stop" what you cheerfully ignore is that this claim relies on the lack of prior registered ownership, which is not how land rights worked prior to European colonisation. In your ideology, so ably summarised by John Locke, the Europeans settled empty land that the natives were allowing to go to waste.
It is simply not possible to pursue an ideology of property rights in the absence of government. Historically, the lands of the North American continent were loosely regarded as the territories of diverse people with fairly consistent principles concerning rights to hunt, farm and exploit resources. Imperial authorities - British and French in particular - made (half hearted) efforts to develop agreements on territory and trade by treaty with the native Americans but were unable to restrain the steady, greedy landgabbing, intrusions of colonists or settlers who are best characterised as "Indian Killers". The colonists formed their own government, first as a confederation of states and then as the United States, to release an unrestrained policy of genocide and westward expansion which arguable continued to the 1890 Massacre at Wounded Knee.
There is no stage of the process at which freedom loving individuals could have achieved their goals without the resources of a nation state and the type of nation state constructed by the colonists was one that met their requirements in full. After all, the US was founded by a bunch of property speculators and they wrote the constitution accordingly. Your blessed Founding Fathers were a bunch of murdering kleptomaniacs.
Your notion that "the state" is some alien entity imposed on freedom loving Americans is unhistorical and bizarre. Your notion that the rights of property are under threat from a state designed to meet the needs of property owners and to protect them from the demands of the great unwashed wanting any share of the wealth is unhistorical and bizarre. The North American continent was not and could not have been colonised by a random assortment of unrelated individuals. It was colonised by a great movement of settlers, acting collectively and with the resources of a powerful state to achieve their collective ends, within which by all means it became possible for individuals to satisfy their specific needs. When the state failed to meet their demands, or even sought to restrain their greed and murderous progress, they changed the state and carried on.
As for the state's continuing role, as exemplified by the concept of "emminent domain," this is not to the end of the state seizing ownership of property away from its citizens, but simply the state arbitrating between the conflicting demands of different property owners when necessary. If a state agency acts outside its proper powers, then it is accountable and can be challenged, as my Trump example earlier demonstrated. What you need to achieve is a better administered, more open and accountable form of government in which the wealthy and powerful are less free to purchase whatever they want at your expense. We like to call it "democracy" and the USA should try it sometime.
Envy
02 Aug '17 16:141 edit
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