The Importance of "Private Property."

[PoliticalChic]

References to some imaginary 'Noble Savage" are like fingernails on a blackboard.
Any who use the term in a way other than satirical, are admitting to acceptance of propaganda, and the inability to think for themselves.


More often than not, it represents advancing an incorrect and unsophisticated view of savages and stone-age primitives at the expense of America's settlers and the Founders themselves.




Case in point: prior to the arrival of the colonials, American's prior colonists, the Indians had no concept of private property, and it's meaning in advancing the liberty of all.


1. But didn't the colonists steal THEIR land?

"The implications for the Indian question are straightforward. Namely: In the extremely unlikely event that any particular Indian can show that he personally is the rightful heir of a particular Indian who was wrongfully dispossessed of a particular piece of property, the current occupants should hand him the keys to his birthright and vacate the premises. Otherwise the current occupants have the morally strongest claim to their property,and the status quo should continue.

Anything more isjust the doctrine of collective guiltmasquerading as a defense of property rights."
Do Indians Rightfully Own America Bryan Caplan EconLog Library of Economics and Liberty




2. "One popular history of Manhattan notes that the Canarsie Indians "dwelt on Long Island, merely trading on Manhattan, and their trickery [in selling what they didn't possess to the Dutch] made it necessary for the white man to buy part of the island over again from the tribes living near Washington Heights. Still more crafty were the Raritans of [Staten Island], for therecords show that Staten Island was sold by these Indians no less than six times."
The Straight Dope How much would the 24 paid for Manhattan be worth in today s money




3. And because they had no concept of private property, Indians regularly killed the animals that they hunted to the point of extinction.

American Indians were almost certainly responsible for the extinction of many large mammal species:
Until ten thousand years ago an incredible bestiary of mammals roamed North America. These were the so-called mega-fauna, an exotic menagerie that included the woolly mammoth, saber-toothed tiger, giant sloth, giant beaver, camel, horse, two-toed horse,and dire wolf. These were the dominant fauna on this continent for tens of millions of years. Then suddenly and mysteriously they disappeared.
Alton Chase, "Playing God In Yellowstone," p. 100


a. "The Vore buffalo jump site in Wyoming...was used five times between 1550 and 1690,and holds the remains of 20,000 buffalo. That means 4,000 or more buffalo were killed each time the jump was used. Other buffalo jumps in the West display the remains of as many as 300,000 buffalo. These sites were so numerous, in fact, and held such large deposits of bone, that for many years they were mined as a source of phosphorus for fertilizer!"
Frison, G.C., "Prehistoric Hunters of the High Plains," pp.239-44




4. Why were they so cavalier, so thoughtless about the future?
Because the animals were there. Destruction was second nature, not consideration of the future.
That's pretty much the difference between said culture, and civilized examples.

Where did change come from?

"In the cases where native peoples did practice sustainable use of resources it was because they had developed the institution of private property, and the market, often as a result of contact with white settlers."
"Wild in Woods: The Myth of the Noble Eco-Savage," Robert Whelan, p. 37
Proof of that statement will follow.

 

[Moonglow]

Morally? So it's moral to uproot a civilized agricultural tribes and move them a thousand miles with inadequate supplies?

 

[Delta4Embassy]

Are we sure PC's a conservative? Makes it really hard to like conservatives. Could be a liberal in conservative's clothing like.

 

[Mad_Cabbie]

Trying to understand this concept, interesting.

I agree with a lot of what I have read, but in the long run, "civilization" stole this land from nature and paved it with concrete.

If the natives had been allowed to keep this land, someone else would certainly have stole it.

The Natives, themselves would have probably evolved into a different culture, altogether; either way, the concrete jungle was inevitable.

In short, we can play this game until the end of time.

Anthropic principle wins out yet again --

If what happened, had not happened, the Mad_Warrior would be writing this and we'd be talking about those poor white people who got their asses kicked, when they only came in peace ~

 

[PoliticalChic]

Trying to understand this concept, interesting.

I agree with a lot of what I have read, but in the long run, "civilization" stole this land from nature and paved it with concrete.

If the natives had been allowed to keep this land, someone else would certainly have stole it.

The Natives, themselves would have probably evolved into a different culture, altogether.

In short, we can play this game until the end of time.

Anthropic principle wins out yet again --

If what happened, had not happened, the Mad_Warrior would be writing this and we'd be talking about those poor white people who got their asses kicked, when they only came in peace ~

Stay tuned, Cabster....and you won't have to guess.

 

[PoliticalChic]

Are we sure PC's a conservative? Makes it really hard to like conservatives. Could be a liberal in conservative's clothing like.

Hey, ugly.....who lifted the rock for you?

 

[Mad_Cabbie]

Not certain what that means, sweetness.

(?)

 

[PoliticalChic]

Not certain what that means, sweetness.

(?)

It means that I'll provide facts, and context.

OK...let's start here:

The culture of the Indians was a destructive one.

It was not just the indigenous fauna of North America that benefited from the inception of property rights...but it was far more beneficial to the people of other, more advanced civilizations than American Indians.....

Raising mankind from tyranny, poverty and disease arrived with the concepts of capitalism, the free market, and private property.

These ideas were not part of the psyche of aboriginal peoples; the concepts represent the advancement of society.




5. ""Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" is a well-known phrase in the United States Declaration of Independence.... Locke argued in his Two Treatises of Government that political society existed for the sake of protecting "property", which he defined as a person's "life, liberty, and estate".

a. That all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety." Virginia Declaration of Rights" Life Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness - Wikipedia the free encyclopedia





6. "A number of times throughout history, tyranny has stimulated breakthrough thinking about liberty. ...John Locke....expressed the radical view that government is morally obliged to serve people, namely by protecting life, liberty, and property. He explained the principle of checks and balances to limit government power. He favored representative government and a rule of law. He denounced tyranny. He insisted that when government violates individual rights, people may legitimately rebel." John Locke Natural Rights to Life Liberty and Property The Freeman Foundation for Economic Education


I know...you want to see the connection to Indians, animal life, and capitalism.

I'll get to that.....next.

 

[Mad_Cabbie]

I'm sorry, this aspect I do not agree with.

"Indians" brought AIDS here? How?

I seem to recall setters bring smallpox and other devastating illnesses with them to this country.

How about slavery? rampant crime?

Before the settlers, the rivers were full of fishes and air was clean.


Sorry, in my life experiences, the simpler cultures always seemed to share the more "civilized" attitudes.

It was often common bushmen, that "did the right thing" whenever given the chance.

 

[Freemason9]

Ridiculous OP. All this is is a collection of anecdotes that supports PC's sociopathic views of other (culturally different) humans. "Property rights" is not a "natural law" whatsoever. In human history, property rights is merely a reference to those that wrest control of space from someone else and maintains that control through violence or the threat thereof.

 

[PoliticalChic]

I'm sorry, this aspect I do not agree with.

"Indians" brought AIDS here? How?

I seem to recall setters bring smallpox and other devastating illnesses with them to this country.

How about slavery? rampant crime?

Before the settlers, the rivers were full of fishes and air was clean.


Sorry, in my life experiences, the simpler cultures always seemed to share the more "civilized" attitudes.

It was often common bushmen, that "did the right thing" whenever given the chance.

""Indians" brought AIDS here? How?"

WHAT????


Who wrote that for you, Moonglow????


The rest of your post is equally absurd.

 

[PoliticalChic]

Ridiculous OP. All this is is a collection of anecdotes that supports PC's sociopathic views of other (culturally different) humans. "Property rights" is not a "natural law" whatsoever. In human history, property rights is merely a reference to those that wrest control of space from someone else and maintains that control through violence or the threat thereof.

"... a collection of anecdotes that supports...."

That was the only correct part of your post.

 

[Roadrunner]

Trying to understand this concept, interesting.

I agree with a lot of what I have read, but in the long run, "civilization" stole this land from nature and paved it with concrete.

If the natives had been allowed to keep this land, someone else would certainly have stole it.

The Natives, themselves would have probably evolved into a different culture, altogether; either way, the concrete jungle was inevitable.

In short, we can play this game until the end of time.

Anthropic principle wins out yet again --

If what happened, had not happened, the Mad_Warrior would be writing this and we'd be talking about those poor white people who got their asses kicked, when they only came in peace ~

The "Native Americans" committed genocide on the earlier arrivals, the Clovis people.

 

[Book of Jeremiah]

References to some imaginary 'Noble Savage" are like fingernails on a blackboard.
Any who use the term in a way other than satirical, are admitting to acceptance of propaganda, and the inability to think for themselves.


More often than not, it represents advancing an incorrect and unsophisticated view of savages and stone-age primitives at the expense of America's settlers and the Founders themselves.




Case in point: prior to the arrival of the colonials, American's prior colonists, the Indians had no concept of private property, and it's meaning in advancing the liberty of all.


1. But didn't the colonists steal THEIR land?

"The implications for the Indian question are straightforward. Namely: In the extremely unlikely event that any particular Indian can show that he personally is the rightful heir of a particular Indian who was wrongfully dispossessed of a particular piece of property, the current occupants should hand him the keys to his birthright and vacate the premises. Otherwise the current occupants have the morally strongest claim to their property,and the status quo should continue.

Anything more isjust the doctrine of collective guiltmasquerading as a defense of property rights."
Do Indians Rightfully Own America Bryan Caplan EconLog Library of Economics and Liberty




2. "One popular history of Manhattan notes that the Canarsie Indians "dwelt on Long Island, merely trading on Manhattan, and their trickery [in selling what they didn't possess to the Dutch] made it necessary for the white man to buy part of the island over again from the tribes living near Washington Heights. Still more crafty were the Raritans of [Staten Island], for therecords show that Staten Island was sold by these Indians no less than six times."
The Straight Dope How much would the 24 paid for Manhattan be worth in today s money




3. And because they had no concept of private property, Indians regularly killed the animals that they hunted to the point of extinction.

American Indians were almost certainly responsible for the extinction of many large mammal species:
Until ten thousand years ago an incredible bestiary of mammals roamed North America. These were the so-called mega-fauna, an exotic menagerie that included the woolly mammoth, saber-toothed tiger, giant sloth, giant beaver, camel, horse, two-toed horse,and dire wolf. These were the dominant fauna on this continent for tens of millions of years. Then suddenly and mysteriously they disappeared.
Alton Chase, "Playing God In Yellowstone," p. 100


a. "The Vore buffalo jump site in Wyoming...was used five times between 1550 and 1690,and holds the remains of 20,000 buffalo. That means 4,000 or more buffalo were killed each time the jump was used. Other buffalo jumps in the West display the remains of as many as 300,000 buffalo. These sites were so numerous, in fact, and held such large deposits of bone, that for many years they were mined as a source of phosphorus for fertilizer!"
Frison, G.C., "Prehistoric Hunters of the High Plains," pp.239-44




4. Why were they so cavalier, so thoughtless about the future?
Because the animals were there. Destruction was second nature, not consideration of the future.
That's pretty much the difference between said culture, and civilized examples.

Where did change come from?

"In the cases where native peoples did practice sustainable use of resources it was because they had developed the institution of private property, and the market, often as a result of contact with white settlers."
"Wild in Woods: The Myth of the Noble Eco-Savage," Robert Whelan, p. 37
Proof of that statement will follow.

Very interesting, PC! I guess that is where the term "Indian Giver" came from? Great thread!

 

[Book of Jeremiah]

Morally? So it's moral to uproot a civilized agricultural tribes and move them a thousand miles with inadequate supplies?

Civilized agricultural tribes?! Did you type that with a straight face?

 

[Tom Sweetnam]

The Solutrean people, Caucasians from Southwestern France, were the first people in North America by as much as 5,000 years before Asians started migrating across the Siberia/Alaska land bridge. They got here somewhere between 18,000-22,000 years ago, sailing across the Atlantic from the Iberian Peninsula. There are now 40 Solutrean excavation sites stretching from Newfoundland to central Texas.

The Sept/Oct issue of Archaeology Magazine devotes a good bit of space to current thinking in New World human migration. New papers and much new dig site evidence was presented at last year's Paleoamerica Odyssey Conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a gathering of many of North America's leading New World archaeologists. Politically correct marxist academics are slowly being dragged kicking and screaming into acceptance of Solutrean migration theories. Solutrean stone tools and spear points are not only pre-Clovis, they're also unique as well. They're only found in two places on the planet: southwestern France and North America.

So what I want to know is, when are the Indians going to start compensating us white people on account of they stole our ancestor's land? I so want my turn as a victim group. I've never known what that's like.

 

[PoliticalChic]

7. Now, on to why the primitive peoples....the folks that environmentalists tell us have wisdom we should emulate....had a limited or non-existent concept of property rights.

OK...now follow: below,

a,- what was

and b.- why it changed.




a. "In the world of Robinson Crusoe property rights play no role,...

Changes in knowledge result in changes in production functions, market values, and aspirations. New techniques,.... the emergence of new property rights takes place in response to the desires of the interacting persons for adjustment to new benefit-cost possibilities..... in response to changes in technology and relative prices.

.... a close relationship existed, both historically and geographically, between the development of private rights in land and the development of the commercial fur trade.

the role played by property right adjustments in taking account of what economists have often cited as an example of an externality-the overhunting of game.




Before the fur trade became established, hunting was carried on primarily for purposes of food and the relatively few furs that were required for the hunter's family.
Hunting could be practiced freely and was carried on without assessing
its impact on other hunters. ...it did not pay for anyone to take them into account. There did not exist anything resembling private ownership in land accounts indicating a socioeconomic organization in which private rights to land are not well developed.




b. .... the advent of the fur trade had two immediate consequences. First, the value of furs to the Indians was increased considerably. Second, and as a result, the scale of hunting activity rose sharply.


The property right system began to change, and it changed specifically
in the direction required to take account of the economic effects made
important by the fur trade.


....the higher commercial value of fur-bearing forest animals, made it productive to establish private hunting lands. ...family proprietorship among the Indians of the Peninsula included retaliation against trespass. Animal resources were husbanded. Sometimes conservation practices were carried on extensively. Family hunting territories were divided into quarters. Each year the family hunted in a different quarter in rotation, leaving a tract in the center as a sort of bank, not to be hunted over unless forced to do so by a shortage in the regular tract.

...highly developed private family rights to hunting lands had also developed which went so far as to include inheritance."
http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Courses/Ec100C/Readings/Demsetz_Property_Rights.pdf




BTW.....conversant with the communist/environmentalist view of property rights?

 

[PoliticalChic]

The Solutrean people, Caucasians from Southwestern France, were the first people in North America by as much as 5,000 years before Asians started migrating across the Siberia/Alaska land bridge. They got here somewhere between 18,000-22,000 years ago, sailing across the Atlantic from the Iberian Peninsula. There are now 40 Solutrean excavation sites stretching from Newfoundland to central Texas.

The Sept/Oct issue of Archaeology Magazine devotes a good bit of space to current thinking in New World human migration. New papers and much new dig site evidence was presented at last year's Paleoamerica Odyssey Conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a gathering of many of North America's leading New World archaeologists. Politically correct marxist academics are slowly being dragged kicking and screaming into acceptance of Solutrean migration theories. Solutrean stone tools and spear points are not only pre-Clovis, they're also unique as well. They're only found in two places on the planet: southwestern France and North America.

So what I want to know is, when are the Indians going to start compensating us white people on account of they stole our ancestor's land? I so want my turn as a victim group. I've never known what that's like.

".... Politically correct marxist academics ..."

This is not the Department of Redundancy Department.

 

[PoliticalChic]

Ridiculous OP. All this is is a collection of anecdotes that supports PC's sociopathic views of other (culturally different) humans. "Property rights" is not a "natural law" whatsoever. In human history, property rights is merely a reference to those that wrest control of space from someone else and maintains that control through violence or the threat thereof.

'....property rights is merely a reference to those that wrest control of space from someone else and maintains that control through violence..."

This is interesting!

Our pal, FreeOfTheAbilityToThink, comes up with the same view that infuses every totalitarian philosophy....communist, Nazi, fascist,....

In this lesson, I'll show its origin.



8. Let's review:

So, John Locke wrote that private property rights are intimately intertwined with liberty. The Founding Fathers studied, and revered Locke.

Government was about enforcing laws that ensured private property rights.


Primitive peoples had no concept of said rights until early settlers put a value on furs, and that value was found in the free market.




9. Watch this bit of irony: at the same time as the Founders were espousing capitalism, the free market, and private property, the provenance of every totalitarian revolution burst on the scene, in the form of the French Revolution!

Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Rousseau was the spiritual godfather of the French Revolution, and every similar one that followed it!
Know what those 'similar' ones were?
Right....the most maniacal, sociopathic revolutions in history!

a. " If the French revolution was the end of monarchy and aristocratic privilege and the emergence of the common man and democratic rights, it was also the beginnings of modern totalitarian government and large-scale executions of "enemies of the People" by impersonal government entities (Robespierre's "Committee of Public Safety").
This legacy would not reach its fullest bloom until the tragic arrival of the German Nazis and Soviet and Chinese communists of the 20th century. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the precursor of the modern pseudo-democrats such as Stalin and Hitler and the "people's democracies."
French Revolution - Robespierre and the Legacy of the Reign of Terror




Guess what Rousseau blamed for all evil in the world?


Yup....private property.

 

[PoliticalChic]

10. What Rousseau saw as the culprit, the source of every evil in society, was the same one as does every communist and Leftist, Occupy'er and Obamunist,
....he blames the existence of private property for a loss of liberty...the very opposite of the truth.



a. This is what Rousseau wrote:

"THE first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of sayingThis is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, "Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody."
Jean Jacques Rousseau (1754), "On the Origin of the Inequality of Mankind." Rousseau On the Origin of Inequality First Part




b.[Rousseau believed] "Private property was followed by laws to protect it, magistrates to carry out the laws, and kings to pass them. The happy independence of the savage, who wants for nothing as he knows of nothing he might want, is replaced by the master/slave relationship of ruler to ruled, which is the result of civil society, association and trade. Thus civilised man sinks into ‘the last degree of inequality’ which endures until ‘the government is ... dissolved by new revolutions...The popular insurrection that ends in the death or deposition of a Sultan is as lawful an act as those by which he disposed, the day before, of the lives and fortunes of his subjects’.
"Wild In The Woods," by Robert Whelan, p.18.

"....the death or deposition..."
He's suggesting same for any who own anything!
Workers of the world unite, and all that.....

No wonder France became an abattoir....

"In the course of France's short revolution, 600,000 French citizens were killed, and another 145,000 fled the country."
Schom, "Napoleon Bonaparte," p. 253.

Know who was listening? Stalin, Hitler, Mao....



So:
Noble savage, Roussseau, communism, property rights. Which one is not like the others?