There is no need for private property ownership of things that are not limited, like breathing air.

Land owners do not have a right to infinite space above them. You can't block air travel or satellites in space and a lot more.

It's the hierarchy in Objectivism, not nonsensical. Law depends on political philosophy which depends on ethics.

They often did not understand it that way, thinking that they were being paid for someone else to use it as a kind of 'treaty' without giving up their own control permanently and their own use. They were dealing between groups, not selling for private ownership.

A lot of them apparently had no idea what it meant to give up control of land for private property when they were paid off.

The Indians did not have the individualist concept of land as property.

None of that refutes the fact that the Indians were primitive tribalists. That doesn't come from a so-called "Objectivist Party Line". It took a long time everywhere for the principles of property rights to evolve.

Kudos to the world's greatest propaganda ministry. . .
They've convinced millions of people not to read their own laws, nor comprehend what they read.
. . .
In America, under the republican form, absolutely owned property is known as private property - a constitutionally protected endowed right.
Qualified ownership is known as estate (like "real estate") and is a revenue taxable privilege.
Since rights protected by law cannot be taxed by law, only privileges can be taxed. That's why you will never find one statute nor constitution that levies an excise tax on private property ownership.
You may want to ask your public servants how your endowed right to absolutely own private property transformed into the revenue taxable privilege to hold real estate.
But do not be surprised at their silence. . .

EWV said that air and water are not owned, yet Congress within the last few years claimed to own rain, and thus to be able to tax us on what fell on our property. Government disregards property rights, esp. BLM. What about national parks, are they the citizens jointly, or the government of the moment, and who owns them when they are declared Heritage Sites?I have noticed that more and more, school children are being taught to disregard property rights, and to think homeowners' land should all belong to everyone. The same schools are teaching them that capitalism is bad.

But you could say the same thing about the Highland Scots, the Wallaces, Nixons, and Johnsons, raiding each other for cattle, carrying off women (who were regarded as property). But the Highlanders were only doing what the Greeks had done before. Achilles and the other Achaean princes were not capable of understanding property rights. Even if they could have grasped the concept as it relates to land, try telling them that the songs about them belong to Homer. Of course, the classical Greeks were primitive collectivist savages. Evidence of that is the fact that if you left your city, you left its protection and could be captured and sold into slavery.

Air and water are now unowned by forced collectivization. In a world of complete laissez faire and Objectivist law, air and water, sunshine and wind, sunsets and the sound of the surf, all could be owned.

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. Of course, the practical reality is different, especially regarding air rights. However, in New York City, for example, air rights are real. You can have your property on the ground and sell the space above it.

In a aerial society of airships, dirigibles, blimps, and balloons, very clear and complex concepts of "air rights" would make us look like Native Americans of the skies.

Just for example, considering the airways, the federal government almost followed what Ayn Rand identified as the proper way for the govenrment to privatize frontier lands. In the 1920s through 1950s, there were radio beacon airways that connected cities. Better navigation devices made those radio beacon airways obsolete. But they could have been privatized.

There is no reason why three-dimensional airspaces cannot be demarcated, owned, bought, sold, leased, rented, ...

The same is true of spaces under the surface of the oceans.

Your are on a nonsensical path.

You do not understand the function of the beads. To the Indians, they gave the land to the Dutch, and the Dutch expressed their gratitude by sealing their friendship by gifting back beads.

The Dutch thought (as we do) that they "bought" the land. They did not. It was given to them. You can condemn it as "primitive" but we exchange gifts all the time and do not call it buying and selling.

Hiawatha was a real person, a politician of the near-Columbian who also apparently invented wampum as a way to ameliorate conflicts between tribes.

Curious Currency: The Story of Money from the Stone Age to the Internet Age by Robert Leonard, Whitman, 2010

Odd & Curious Money by Charles Opitz, First Impression, 1986

An Ethnographic Study of Primitive Money by Charles Opitz, First Impression, 2001

Land as property is not necessarily individualist. I agree that there is an individualist way to conceptualize land as property, but mostly, we still have tribalist collectivist ways that are expressed as a Wall Across the Border, as in Israel and Palestine today, the former East Germany, or, it seems, Texas tomorrow.

More to the point, are in the individualist concepts of machinery, tools, and (most importantly) ideas as property.

Imagine going back in time and explaining to Cicero that you are going to perform a song so often that a million people will learn to sing it, but you are still going to claim that it is your property.

And we still have a long way to go...

Unfortunately, ewv, the Objectivist Party Line is wrong on this point. The facts of history speak differently than the preconceived notions and ad hominem arguments.

The Native Americans did, indeed understand property, though not the same as we do today, not in every context, and not the same way across all tribes, or across all times. Lumping them all together is primitive, collectivist thinking.

More to the point, neither did the Vikings, Romans, or Greeks have our view of property. They, too, were primitive collectivists. Our understanding developed slowly and is still developing. We call land "real estate" or "real property" because the primitive collectivists of the Middle Ages did not understand machines, tools, or ideas as property. Only land was real. And they called it "estate" because title came from the state - "I hereby dub thee Duke of York." And the king could un-dub you from "your" property if you changed religions... Only in the 1990s did the UK make a dent in "treasure trove" laws that denied a farmer the right to any gold or silver coins found on his land because all gold and silver (indeed, ultimately, all land) was the property of the Crown.

As an counter-example, as an example of one step along the hard road of understanding, in the Middle Ages when only land was real property and only men could own it, in the County of Champaign, in the town of Troyez, where they held Great Fairs (with Capital Letter) and whence we have the "troy" ounce of precious metals, market stalls became heritable property, and could be owned by women. Of course, that was an exception. In most of the primitive collectivist world of Europe and America, women could not own property until the 20th century. (In Egypt of the 16th century CE and in other Muslim lands, women were legally entitled to inheritance by customary law. See Making Big Money in 1600: The Life and Times of Isma'Il Abu Taqiyya, Egyptian Merchant by Nellie Hanna.

Yes he was, but much of the guiding proper ethics was only implicit and had not been formulated. Property rights are moral principles that must be identified like any other philosophical principles. They are objective, not 'intrinsic' to 'mixing labor'. Start with egoism, then apply it in a social context for principles of rights, then establish objective legal definitions and procedures to protect our rights.

Indians had no moral claim on the land. Indigenous tribalism has no more or less claim to control than non-indigenous tribalism. They had no concepts of property property rights to the land, only a primitive form of political control. The brutal inter-tribal warfare wasn't fought over each property rights either; it was only ruthless wars of one tribal gang against another.

Anyone had a right to settle on the unowned land, most of which wasn't even being used in the very sparsely inhabited wilderness. And anyone had a right to institute a free society with a better government protecting the rights of the individual for civilization.

Tribes claiming control over "ancient sacred ground" have no more right to it today than centuries before, only a superior force in the form of the National Park Service, etc. helping them to destroy civilization and private property.