Difference between revisions of "The worthless Lockean Fable of Initial Acquisition"
From Critiques Of Libertarianism
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Go ahead: identify the original owners of land in any part of the US, and explain how their ownership was not by conquest. You can't even do it for the Native Americans, because they also fought wars of conquest amongst each other. There is no part of the world where ownership hasn't changed due to conquest except unowned international waters and perhaps Antarctica. | Go ahead: identify the original owners of land in any part of the US, and explain how their ownership was not by conquest. You can't even do it for the Native Americans, because they also fought wars of conquest amongst each other. There is no part of the world where ownership hasn't changed due to conquest except unowned international waters and perhaps Antarctica. | ||
==What about homesteading?== | ==What about homesteading?== | ||
| − | About the only claimed historical example of homesteading in the Lockean sense was Medieval Iceland: but they stole that land by expelling Irish Catholics who probably stolen it from aboriginal inhabitants. | + | About the only claimed historical example of homesteading in the Lockean sense was Medieval Iceland: but they stole that land by expelling Irish Catholics who probably had stolen it from aboriginal inhabitants. |
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| + | There is no land in the world that can show a convincing chain of ownership through original homesteading (before other owners.) Existing claims of homesteading generally ignore pre-existing peoples who were swept aside. The US? Swept away the Native Americans, who in their turn had swept away earlier tribes back to the Clovis culture or even earlier. Europe and Asia? Don't make me laugh. Australia? Swept away the Aborigines, and who knows what their unrecorded history over the past 40,000 years was like. Africa? Numerous whole species of humans were swept away, let alone Homo sapiens tribes. | ||
The brief homesteading period in the US was a government method of giving away land it owned (stolen from the Amerinds), not spontaneous removal from a commons. It resulted in government-recognized ownership, not a natural right. | The brief homesteading period in the US was a government method of giving away land it owned (stolen from the Amerinds), not spontaneous removal from a commons. It resulted in government-recognized ownership, not a natural right. | ||
