Nothing in your post contradicts or even addresses the facts I brought up. I did not “denounce the founding of this country as based on stealing from the Indians”, and I did not present “revisionist ethnic rationalizations on behalf of tribalists and the poetic propaganda of supposedly innocent noble savages and their ‘ancestral homelands’".

Re: “The land base of this country was not ‘stolen’ by ‘statist land grabs’ of ‘peaceful villages’.” Most of it wasn’t, but some of it was, as I discussed above.

Re: “There was no moral equivalency between the primitive Indian savagery and settlers fighting back, including herding the tribes out of the way up through the late 19th century.” The moral status of interactions among Native Americans and European colonizers is context-dependent. It pertains to individual acts that took place at varying times and places and under varying circumstances. There is no single blanket “moral status” that can cover all of these interactions. Sometimes settlers were in the right, sometimes Native Americans were, and sometimes neither side was. The claim that it was all about “primitive Indian savagery and settlers fighting back” is a vast oversimplification.

Re: “Settlers had every right to live in the unowned wilderness and no duty to submit to primitive tribal control.” It logically follows, then, that “Native Americans had every right to live in the unowned wilderness and no duty to submit to colonial, state or federal government control.” Both statements are correct.

Based on the best historical evidence of the time, Karl Marx - who investigated facts as catalogued in the British Museum library - claimed that gold is the highest form of commodity money. Ludwig von Mises said the same thing, though he derived that logically from his Kantian premises without needing to be bothered by mere facts of history. So, were I to cite Karl Marx as an authority on the place of gold as money in the 19th century, what would you say to that? My point is that the facts here are independent of the intellectual errors of libertarians or progressives.

The problem of the United States versus the Native Americans reflects the many contradictions in the theory of property and property rights that we inherited. While the Europeans depended on finely grained understandings among themselves - "virtual" wealth in credit, for instance - they did not extend the same theories to the Natives whose lands they wanted.

I point out that if you look at a picture of "Earth at Night" you will see that mostly, we are concentrated in a few places. Aliens from outer space might recognize that fact and still insist on building their own spaceports in the greatly "unoccupied" expanses of Nebraska ...

Last year, I read half a dozen books and another dozen journal articles about CAHOKIA. It seems that the Europeans first came to America at what was for them a lucky low point in Native civilization.

Nonetheless, after the collapse of Cahokia and Mound culture in general, in what became "Virginia" down to "Georgia" extensive agriculture and large villages were attractive enough that some English settlers abandoned their failing colonies and went native. This, of course, was before the English Revolution of 1688, John Locke's great thesis, the English Bill of Rights, and other roots of the new American civilization.

Also, for a graduate class in criminology theory, writing a term paper on traditional forms of punishment and remediation, I happened upon the Cheyenne. It seems that about 1780 give or take they had some sort of internal power struggle that was settled by a wise woman. She happened to be a slave from the Asinoboine tribe, but they recognized her authority on this matter. She set up a system of checks and balances in which local chiefs elected non-hereditary grand chiefs who formed a general council. Being spread out over the Great Plaines, they had four troops of "soldiers" - Dogs, Foxes, Crazy Dogs, and something else I forget - whose job it was to patrol the outer margins and herd the stragglers back to the center. We're talking about "margins" and "centers" many miles in extent: for the annual gathering of the tribes each summer, the ceremonial "center" was a mile across. (Though ethnologists called them "soldiers" they did not actually fight external enemies, because hardly anyone was out there until we showed up.)

The whole promotion of sweeping accusations of racism and multiculturalism to denounce the founding of this country as based on stealing from the Indians is false and leftist in origin.

That entire theme was widely promoted by the New Left and the radical Indian ethnicity movement decades ago where it was picked up by libertarians and anarchists attracted to and pandering to the leftist counter culture. Strained arguments couching in "libertarian" rhetoric and re-interpretations of "documentation" do not make it true.

This page is about property rights and their defense, not revisionist ethnic rationalizations on behalf of tribalists and the poetic propaganda of supposedly innocent noble savages and their "ancestral homelands". There was no moral equivalency between the primitive Indian savagery and settlers fighting back, including herding the tribes out of the way up through the late 19th century. Settlers had every right to live in the unowned wilderness and no duty to submit to primitive tribal control.

The land base of this country was not "stolen" by "statist land grabs" of "peaceful villages". That sweeping misrepresentation was not the basis of this country, which was founded on the rights of the individual despite the primitive tribes sparsely inhabiting the continent and despite injustices like slavery in the south that were eliminated precisely because of what the country was.

I am neither leftist, multiculturalist nor anarchist, I have never invoked the (anti)concept of “white guilt”, and my posts certainly did not steal from or attack Ayn Rand. What I have done is present documented facts regarding actions that the U.S. government undertook to benefit citizens in primarily slaveholding states by uprooting large numbers of Native Americans, peaceful or otherwise, and forcing them to resettle hundreds of miles away. The “Indian wars” were primarily fought between largely collectivist tribes and considerably collectivist governments whose implementation of property rights was race-dependent and included the “right” to own slaves. Both peaceful settlers and peaceful Native Americans were victims of these government and tribal policies over which they had very little influence. As for atrocities, there were plenty on both sides.

I agree with you that “the whole welfare state reservation system today is destructive,” but I would point out that this treatment of Native Americans as “subhuman tourist attractions” was facilitated by the then-entrenched and widespread view of them as racially inferior. This is a clear example of a mindset that Ayn Rand considered abhorrent and described as “the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.”

The Indian wars persisted because the Indians would not stop and leave the settlers alone. There is no moral equivalence between a band of savages murdering isolated families and burning their homes versus an attack on the tribe that perpetrated it. The Indian tribes were a serious problem. Their marauding raids were characteristic, not isolated crimes.

This persisted for centuries. It doesn't make any difference when the word "reservation" was first used to designate areas confining tribes which had no concept of individualism or private property rights.

Individual Indians did in fact assimilate into an individualist culture and there were few Indian slaves even in the south. The overwhelming Indian problem was the tribalists who had no concept of rights or individualism and acted accordingly. That set the context for the entire Indian war problems and how they were viewed by civilized people defending their rights and frightened by the Indian raids. Individuals settling in the wilderness despite the tribalists were not a "statist land grab".

If you want to criticize systematic unjustified treatment of the Indians look at the late 19th century and early 20th century government actions like the "progressive" national parks where Indians were removed and otherwise treated as subhuman tourist attractions long after there was any threat of Indian wars. The whole welfare state reservation system today is destructive.

The leftist, multiculturalist sweeping trashing and misrepresentation of the settling and founding of this country as Evil White "racism" and "stealing the land from the Indians" is no better when dressed up in bizarre libertarian rhetoric of "statist land grab" that doesn't show any more conceptual understanding than the rest of the anarchist "idealist" fringe. It's no wonder that they simultaneously steal from and attack Ayn Rand and still pile on trying to resurrect the otherwise rightfully forgotten 1970s Rothbard-Liggio line.

Marauding raids occurred on both sides, and the 1823 Supreme Court prohibition on private citizens buying land from Native Americans did not “pertain to tribes on reservations,” it predated the reservation system and involved land that had been purchased in 1773, before the U.S. was even a nation.

“The Indian Removal Act was put in place to give to the southern states the land that Indians had settled on.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_... The “civilized society” that benefitted from this policy was primarily a society of (civilized?) slaveholders who regarded Native Americans, like African-Americans, as inferior beings not deserving of rights. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 did not distinguish between peaceful and warlike Native American settlements – it lumped them all into a collective category in order to carry out a statist land grab.

Indian relocation and removal pertained to tribal warfare using large areas as a base for marauding raids, not "peaceful Native American villages" nestled in the countryside. You keep leaving out the Indian wars. They were obviously "relevant ". They were central to the policy of the time, lasting through the late 19th century.

Prohibitions on private citizens buying land from Indians pertained to tribes on reservations, in accordance with Federal policy, because they would not live as individuals. Private citizens could not override government reservation policy. It was not about Indians living as private citizens assimilated into the civilized population with private land ownership.

None of the standard multicultural political correctness and revisionism is an argument for the White Guilt line denouncing the settlement of the continent and establishing a civilized society.

No one said "if you have a better understanding of property rights than someone else then you can take their property".

There is no right "as a land-owner... to a wedge from the center of the Earth extending infinitely into space". Skyscrapers are not built in an infinite outer space.

Seriously??

“Indian removal was a policy of the United States government in the 19th century whereby Native Americans were forcibly removed from their ancestral homelands in the eastern United States to lands west of the Mississippi River, thereafter known as Indian Territory.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_...

Also:

“In 1823, a landmark decision was made by the Supreme Court (Johnson v. M'Intosh) that private citizens could not purchase lands from Native Americans, because Indians could not hold title to their own lands, even if they had occupied them for years. This was because their 'right of occupancy' was subordinate to the United States' 'right of discovery.' This decision would become a staple in federal and state cases related to Indian land title for the next two centuries.” http://www.legendsofamerica.com/na-pu...

And:

http://www.history.com/topics/native-...
http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroom...

Because what you are saying is that if you have a better understanding of property rights than someone else then you can take their property.

I pointed out that "air rights" are a new understanding that did not exist before the industrial age brought the skyscraper and aviation.

You deny the "wedge into outer space" but it is known that a commercial enterprise on the
ground sold the space above it to a skyscraper that was built over it.

In your view, they could just have built the structure over the store and screwed the owner for his primitive lack of knowledge.

NYC 2012 here: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/artic...

Air Rights in Wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_rig...

The setters did not just "enter a peaceful Native American village and force the inhabitants to leave". That is not how the continent was settled. The Indian wars most certainly were relevant. The "question" was an "are you still beating your wife" invalid question based on a false premise.

I was referring to events that occurred during the course of European settlement of the New World. The fact that there were "Indian wars" is not relevant to my question above.

You wrote "In theory right now in common real estate law in the USA (or at least the Eastern part of it), as a land-owner you have a wedge from the center of the Earth extending infinitely into space", not "historical understanding" now "changed". It isn't true never was. Rights to "infinite wedges" into space have no meaning and never did.

The "interesting statement" was the definition. That rights are part of morality does not mean that they apply or are meaningful out of context. Every part of morality does not apply to every choice or action regardless of its meaning and relevance. Where there is only one person there is no social context in which to apply principles about choices and actions in a social context.

The country was not founded on "entering peaceful villages and forcing the inhabitants to leave". You left out the fact that there were Indian wars.

You have misrepresented and misquoted in several ways what she said.

Advocating self defense against aggressor nations does not mean advocating as mere "blobs".

You are describing current law, not the law "in a world of complete laissez faire and Objectivist law." I've never seen any Objectivist assertion of a "view" as a property right. Unless an explicit prior agreement exists, I regard the assertion of such a "right" as interference in a neighbor's property right, as constructing a tall building on his property does not constitute an initiation of force against anyone else.

Some jurisdictions do recognize specific airspace rights of property owners. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/v...

Now please excuse me while I file my claim to a distant galaxy and let the inhabitants know that there's a new sheriff in town. :-)

Yes. It is another problem with our land-based understanding of "property." But it also means that if you do not own the iSS, then you cannot stop me from flying a drone in "your" airspace.

US Patent Law is problematic on many grounds. For one thing, we now follow the rest of the world in which "first to file" replaces "first to invent."

Also, you do not need to actually build anything to get it patented. You did back in 1793. That changed in the 19th century. A few years ago, Randall L. Mills was granted a patent for "hydrino energy." Complaints from other scientists caused the USPTO to withdraw its grant.

See my reply below to ewv
https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post...

You seem to be saying that Crusoe would not have any property rights in things that he did not actively use. There is no "potential property."

Thanks for the reply. I agree. My comment and question were directed to db. Sorry about the misdirection. But, again, I appreciate the reply. I am trying to understand his claims.

You buy a home for the view. I put up a taller home to the west. This loss of value has been argued in the courts. In some cities, it is against the building codes to deprive a previous landholder from the value of the view. Here in Austin, it was against the law to put up any structure taller than the Capitol dome. The two oldest "skyscrapers" are a mere 11 stories.

Can I build a space station that blocks the Sun? It has been considered.

The laws that I cited were the historical understanding of landed property rights. Of course, the invention of aviation changed that -- by force of custom, not by any rational-realist arguments. It is still a problem today, as when people fly their toy drones over each other's homes. The courts have ruled that you do not have a right to privacy from the air. Thus, the police and see your marijuana plants and arrest you without needed a warrant. Of course, it also means that I can stand on my roof and watch you sunbathing naked -- whereas I do not have the same right to look into your windows and see you in your home: that's being a peeping Tom, which is against the law.