Private property rights

A few weeks ago, a friend sent me the following joke, via e-mail.

“About 1966 or so, a NASA team doing work for the Apollo moon mission took the astronauts near Tuba City where the terrain of the Navajo Reservation looks very much like the Lunar surface. With all the trucks and large vehicles were two large figures that were dressed in full Lunar spacesuits.

“Near by, a Navajo sheep herder and his son were watching the strange creatures walk about, occasionally being tended by personnel. The two Navajo people were noticed and approached by the NASA personnel.

“Since the man did not know English, his son asked, for him, what the strange creatures were and the NASA people told them that they are just men getting ready to go to the moon. The man became very excited and asked if he could send a message to the moon with the astronauts.

“The NASA personnel thought this was a great idea so they rustled up a tape recorder. After the man gave them his message they asked his son to translate.

“But the son refused to translate.

“Later, they tried a few more people on the reservation to translate and every person they asked would chuckle and then refuse to translate.

“Finally, with cash in hand, someone translated the message, ‘Watch out for these guys, they come to take your land’.”

Actually, this is a common misconception often deliberately advanced by the Left. In point of fact, the Indians never had any land to steal. In their primitive, tribal, collectivist cultures, there was no such thing as private property rights. There were no deeds to the land. The land never had individual owners. It was “owned” entirely by the clan (or clans).

It was only when Americans expanded westward, in a spirit of manifest destiny, that land and private property rights were firmly established and laws enacted to protect them. The Indians then had the opportunity to adapt, to trade in a free, open-market, capitalistic system, which they never exploited, preferring instead to become hopeless drunks on welfare state Indian reservation camps administered by the bungling clowns at the US Department of Interior.

Private property rights cannot exist without a vital degree of exclusivity. In order to own a piece of property, one must have the right to the use, disposal and liquidation of that particular piece of property. If everybody owns it, nobody really owns it. If you can’t sell it (or part of it), you hardly have any rights to it–and you probably don’t own it.

(There are no such things as group rights; only individuals can have rights.)

Since the Indians ostensibly had no individual claim upon any particular piece of real estate, and could not possibly trade or liquidate that property in the open marketplace (of which there were none), ownership as we know it could not possibly have been established. Therefore, since there never was any legal, rational form of ownership, a theft or robbery could not have possibly occurred.

To illustrate this point even further, imagine that the United States invaded Stalin’s Russia and thereby proceeded to dismantle the Soviet dictatorship, establish free markets and constitutional democracy (including an American-styled Bill of Rights). Could the Soviet peoples then legitimately claim that they were robbed of their “freedom,” just as the Indians (and the native Hawaiians) claim that they were robbed of their “lands”?

Liberals always look for victims–and to socialism to alleviate their misery. In a free country,such as America, any man, with discipline, hard work and reason, can make it big. There are no excuses. The liberals cannot continue to blame Christopher Columbus and Captain James Cook for the impoverished plights of the American Indians and native Hawaiians today.