John Powers, writing for the Lafayette Journal & Courier has a truly excellent article explaining the run-up to the Battle of Tippecanoe. Today marks the 200th anniversary of William Henry Harrison’s departure from Fort Harrison near Terre Haute. The battle itself would take place nine days later near the confluence of the Tippecanoe and Wabash Rivers; the town of Battle Ground has grown up in the area.
This battle ended up breaking the back of Indian resistance east of the Mississippi. The remarkably capable Shawnee leader, Tecumseh, had been organizing tribes, trying to get them to agree to the principle that the Indians owned their land in common and would not negotiate sale of their land. In 1809, about two years earlier, there had been the Treaty of Fort Wayne where Harrison had negotiated the acquisition of about 3 million acres in what is now Indiana and Illinois. Tecumseh refused to recognize the deal and, on two occasions, met with Harrison. Critically, according to Powers, Tecumseh refused to guarantee the safety of parties attempting to survey the new acquisition.
Tecumseh and his brother, Tenskwatawa a/k/a “the Prophet,” had built a village on the Wabash, just downstream from the Tippecanoe River. (Incidentally, reading Tenskwatawa’s biography on Wikipedia has strong similarities to Sen. Joe McCarthy — an alcoholic who rises to prominence demonizing a foreign power and persecuting members of his own tribe (“witches”) as being in league with that power.) The settlement of Tecumseh and the Prophet had somewhere on the order of 400 warriors dedicated to the notion that Native Americans owned the land in concert and that, among other things, the Treaty of Fort Wayne did not constitute a valid transfer of property. If Harrison couldn’t survey the land, he couldn’t sell it. Stale mate. However, after the second meeting, Harrison knew that Tecumseh would be away from the village (Tecumseh went south to recruit other tribes to his alliance), and Harrison didn’t think much of the Prophet. So, Harrison took the strategically sound, if not entirely honorable, tactic of moving on the village while Tecumseh was gone.
The rest, as they say, is history. It’s also a good illustration of how the real world works. Property rights, far from being inalienable or natural, don’t mean squat – effectively don’t exist, I’d argue – without a government strong enough and willing to enforce them. The same holds true for other kinds of rights. We should keep this in mind when property right purists seem to take for granted that property rights will be enforced and other rights will either be ignored or be subservient. There may be good policy reasons for granting this kind of preference, but the priority of property rights should not be assumed as some kind of natural order.
God made the land but a gang of thieves built the fences.
Doug,
No disrespect intended, but I just find this choice of words curious: the remarkably capable Shawnee leader…
Why remarkable?
Why not? He was a very effective leader.
On the contrary, it is the fact that these rights do indeed exist independently of any ability to enforce them, that makes enforcement of those rights morally justified.
Doug, I agree he was effective, but calling it remarkable implies (to me) that it was unexpected for him to be so, and I wondered why. Probably I just misunderstand your intended meaning.
It’s unusual for anyone to have that level of leadership ability. In that respect, you’re right; it is unexpected and, therefore, “remarkable.” I’m not sure what’s getting lost in translation.
Aside from your declaration that this is so; where do you find evidence of this “fact” of independent existence?
Not sure either, so letting it go.
Doug, what law school did you go to? Did you ever read the Declaration of Independence? What’s the name of the strawman that told you that conservatives don’t think that we need a government to protect property rights?
The Declaration of Independence isn’t a legal document.
And, perhaps I was less than clear. What I’m saying is that we not only need government to protect property rights; property rights do not exist in the absence of government.
And, what I’m really getting at is that a lot of arguments seem to assume the primacy of property rights over other kinds of rights — taking for granted that government will enforce contracts and other property rights, hardly acknowledging that this is government action at all. If that’s taken for granted, it’s easier for the arguer to oppose, say, minimum wage, environmental regulations, or welfare benefits on the grounds of being opposed to government intervention in our personal affairs. What the person is really doing is preferring property rights to some of these other rights.
(And, I’m open here to the argument that “hey, there is no right to eat” or whatever. Which is true, because I’ve always struggled with the concept of “rights” — near as I can figure, there is no “right” except those which we grant ourselves through laws and enforcement of those laws.)
There are plausible policy reasons for preferring property rights to those other “rights.” But, I think the proponents of those policies need to make their case instead of just assuming that government should, inevitably, observe and enforce property rights but only observe and enforce other kinds of rights grudgingly, if at all.
The article also highlights the conceptual difference in property rights between Native Americans and Anglo-Americans. The natives did not draw lines or record deeds in their own culture. As Tecumseh said, they thought the land belonged to all tribes in the region. It is interesting how the first impulse was to buy or trade for the land, which provided legal title under the Anglo-American system. If that didn’t work, they went to conquest and forced removal. This also shows how government intervention and policy choices greatly influence the free market. All of the land titles in the area resulted from government activism.
Reminds me of an exchange I saw attributed to Carl Sandberg:
“Get off my land!”
“What for?”
“Because it’s mine.”
“Where did you get it?”
“From my father.”
“Where did he get it?”
“From his father.”
“Where did he get it?”
“He fought for it.”
“Well, I’ll fight you for it.”
The Declaration of Independence is a mission statement, and makes clear the purpose of government and the relationship to inalienable rights.
I do think that ownership of property is natural to human existence (there are very few example in modern human history where the common ownership of property worked at all). Sure, the strong could prey on the weak in the absence of government, but then there are far more examples of government stealing property than of it protecting it.
You never cease to amaze me with how little you know about libertarianism (because you ask questions that appear to be inquisitive of libertarian topics, but seem to have your mind made up against them). This is a well worn topic.
Regarding the native Americans concept of property (or lack of it), what was the result? An incredibly violent society. And what was the result once the Europeans divided it up into legal holdings? An incredibly peaceful society, one that eventually went on to develop productivity far in excess of anything the native Americans could possibly conceive of (who, let’s be honest, in many ways existed no differently than man in the paleolithic period).
Then you are easily amazed.
But, see, you are making policy arguments in favor of recognizing the priority of property rights. That’s really what I’m looking for.
To me (to the extent anyone cares), a convincing conversation looks like this:
“Government should enforce contractual property rights but not the right to health care because the former [leads to good results] and the latter [leads to bad or unsustainable results].”
An unconvincing conversation goes more like this:
“Government sucks and shouldn’t get involved in health care. [If/when government’s instrumental role in the existence of property rights is mentioned, some grudging acknowledgment is made about how no one is advocating anarchy.]
How many of the signers of the Declaration of Independence believed that Native Americans had inalienable rights to land they lived on for centuries?
Europeans = “incredibly peaceful society”. That is just about the most “incredible” thing I have seen this year. In case I’m being too subtle, “incredible” is a offhand euphemism for something a lot less polite. Did you sleep through history class(es)? Or, are you just Buchanan-ing your history now, too?
And while I’m at it, “ownership of property is natural to human existence”? Did you sleep through anthropology as well?
Now, it is you who are amazing me. Truly.
Yes, “incredibly peaceful society”. We’re talking about Indiana here. The mid to late 1800s to today have been incredibly peaceful by the standards of history.
We certainly didn’t have roving war parties (well, I’m sure Doug will come up with examples from the Civil War where we did have them, but other than that…)
And yes, ownership of property is natural to human existence. Try taking one of those flints away from a caveman…
Doug, I’m not even going to attempt to correct your ignorance. You can believe what you want to believe. But this is pretty well covered in, say, Hayek, just off the top of my head. I seem to recall he argued for real rights vs. the B.S. rights (similar to health care) made up by socialists at the time.
For example, it isn’t even clear what a right to health care would even entail. Health care is such a nebulous thing (For example, would it be a right to any procedure that your doctor deemed appropriate?)
Sorry, I really don’t want to go down that rat hole.
I’ll send you my copy of Charles Murray’s “What It Means to be a Libertarian”, you can educate yourself.
I’m not sure you’re on solid ground with this one. During the Age of Exploration, European ship captains were always driven nuts by the thieving natives when they pulled into port in South America or the South Pacific. The usual explanation for the “theft” is that these cultures simply didn’t see ownership the same way as the Europeans did.
(And, maybe roving war parties of the Civil War might be an excellent example for this topic since the main source of contention in that conflict had to do with the role of government in recognizing and enforcing a particular kind of property right.)
Well, shit. There’s my problem right there: I’m uneducated and ignorant. Now I know. And (as G.I. Joe made clear), knowing is half the battle.
Well, just off a brief look around the internets yielded the term “Indiana white caps”. Now, why would there ever be a perceived “need” for groups like this if we were such an incredibly peaceful society?
Serial killers, outlaws (and gangs) have always found their way around Indiana. Doesn’t lend itself to the term “incredibly”.
I was going to post those Sandburg lines, from The People, Yes. But you beat me to it, Doug. (I think the first line is “Get off my estate!”, if memory serves.)
Buzzcut, I couldn’t help but notice that you pointed to the Declaration of Independence on property rights. What are we to make, then, of the traditional view that Jefferson omitted the last part of Locke’s life, liberty, and property, and substituted “the pursuit of Happiness”? (And we know that Jefferson – among others – explicitly avoided the “property” text of Virginia’s earlier Declaration.)
Furthermore, the only item on the list of grievances in the Declaration that directly deals with property rights is the quartering of troops. And even that has to be tempered by the fact that the Third Amendment allows for the quartering of troops during wartime, provided some kind of due process.
And (as G.I. Joe made clear), knowing is half the battle.
Was it G.I. Joe? I’m going to need a YouTube reference to verify.
Well, shit. There’s my problem right there: I’m uneducated and ignorant.
Well, to put it more nicely, everything that you know about libertarianism you learned from Rolling Stone.
Seriously, if you are going to argue against libertarianism, I think that it’s important to actually know something about the arguments that the philosophy put forth. Libertarianism is not anarchism. Libertarians want government for specific purposes for specific reasons, and they absolutely have an answer as to why property rights come before a right to health care, or a minimum wage, and it does not rest on the efficacy (or lack of it) of the later two.
They also answer how “pursuit of happiness” translates into property rights.
No, libertarianism isn’t anarchism; it’s always been purely, solely, and entirely a morally bankrupt pseudo-intellectual rationalization for unbridled sociopathic greed and selfishness. “I am not my brother’s keeper” and “I’ve got mine, so screw you Jack” are the mottoes by which each and every libertarian conducts each and every nanosecond of all of his life activities. Buzzcut’s position is classic libertarianism: “my property rights are always infinitely more important than the human rights of any and all other persons on the planet.
Terry, what libertarians have you read? Hayek? Friedman? Charles Murray?
Needless to say, your post is not only ignorant, it’s juvenile. It’s like reading an Op-ed by a 11th grader.
Name dropping appeal to authority and personal insults. Compelling substitutes for argument, to be sure, but why don’t you just explain why Terry is wrong?
Libertarianism really isn’t just jumped up selfishness because [x, y, and z].
Or, alternately, libertarian selfishness is good policy because [a, b, and c].
Doug, in case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been a little… testy… with you lately. I think I know why, and I think I can articulate it (hopefully).
I think that you’re a pretty typical liberal. You’re educated, you’re informed, yet you are shockingly parochial in where you get your education and information from. As such, you make assumptions about the other side that are not just wrong, but totally ignorant of even the basics of what the other side believes.
What gets me angry is that your pretty typical in your parochialness. (I apologize that it gets taken out on you.)
Now, I could cut and past from “Road to Serfdom” to show where you are wrong. Or you could just make the effort to actually understand what the other side believes.
BTW, conservatives don’t have this problem, seeing as how the media and educational establishment have such a liberal bias. I am steeped in liberalism on a daily basis. Libertarianism? Not so much.
The West Lafayette Public Library has a copy of both “Road to Serfdom” and “What it means to be a libertarian”.
I’d start with the later, it is only 178 pages. It is a very quick read.
Buzz: You’re being way too easy. Make them read Atlas Shrugged.
IMHO, libertarianism isn’t “I am not my brother’s keeper”. Libertarianism is “government should try to force the redistribution of wealth. Let people decide who they want to give their money to voluntarily.”
Just explain the bases and rationale of your arguments — like Doug does.
This started with the Battle of Tippecanoe and Doug’s take on the nature of property rights and the role of government. What property rights did the Indians have to the lands they inhabited right before the battle? What did the military action do to alter those rights? What government policies were behind the battle and the displacement of the inhabitants of Prophetstown? My take: the federal government wanted to acquire land from indigenous peoples so that European settlers would move into the area. As far as I know, the people who elected the Congress, President and VP supported this policy. So the federal government carried out its policy. Afterward, legal title to the property eventually went to European settlers. So who are the libertarians here? The Indians?
It’s almost an irrelevant question. Whatever the situation at that time, shortly thereafter a property regime was established, one that in still in force today, and one that created unprecedented peace and prosperity.
Sucks if you were an Indian, I will give you that. But from the standpoint of someone trying to judge the morality of the property regime as it stands right now, like I said, it is irrelevant.
Extreme right-wing sociopaths react with venom when they encounter someone (a former poli-sci major quite well acquainted with the so-called thinkers Buzzcut cynically uses to try to justify his utter lack of concern for his fellow man) who sees through his deceitful rhetoric of “freedom” to the reality of what a “libertarian” society would look like: vicious, brutal, cutthroat, dog-eat-dog Social-Darwinism, a world in which every person would spend every attosecond from birth to death in a never-ending state of all-out warfare directly against each and every other living being in the universe.
Terry, the problem with your characterization is that the US was pretty darn libertarian before WW1. I don’t think it was a “vicious, brutal, cutthroat, dog-eat-dog Social-Darwinism, a world in which every person would spend every attosecond from birth to death in a never-ending state of all-out warfare directly against each and every other living being in the universe.”
Nice sentence there, though. I will be cutting and pasting it to my blog for future reference.
“Buzz: You’re being way too easy. Make them read Atlas Shrugged. ”
God, no. That book is seriously unreadable (although Rand’s non-fiction is very readable. Some of her earlier fiction isn’t quite as bad, either).
I like Doug too much to suggest he read that book.
I don’t know why people can’t say, “We are imperfect, and often wrong at one point before getting things set in a better direction.”
I think most readers recognize me as a libertarian. I don’t mind to acknowledge that our driving out of the Indians was as imperial an action as there ever was. And, the allowance of slavery in the Constitution was as mind-blowingly wrong as one can imagine.
Let’s not overlook that virtually all property was acquired by force at some point- whether here in Indiana, or in any place in the world. It’s very rare that some explorer discovered some wholly uninhabited land, and set up a free society where land was parceled out at auction. Never, if I’m not mistaken. So, the justifications of any of our claims are going to be soiled in some way, if we take things back to origination. Doug, me, whomever else here who owns a home, regardless of ideological footing. We own land that was forcibly taken by our government from the Indians- although at the same time, the Indians generally didn’t recognize property rights, which we have been pretty happy to use in justification of our claims nationwide. (I know this Tecumseh example points to a land ownership claim, and I’ll get to that, but I wanted to include the generalization for the sake of making a point.)
So, regardless of form of government, or ideology, it tends to start like this:
Original peoples occupy land, conqueror dislodges original peoples, conqueror sets up its’ own form of government. New occupiers of the land disregard the previous occupiers history, a new day is proclaimed. We are no different in our history.
So, to the concluding point of the original post, I completely agree with Doug. Property rights have to be enforced by a government that backs the rights. As with any ‘rights’, you can call them inalienable, and it is excellent rhetoric to do so, but without enforcement, either personally or by a government, they don’t amount to much. This is why libertarians are so keen on property rights. We may not believe in government doing much, but we certainly do believe in a strong government that protects the just property claims of individuals, and defends the borders from invasion.
Terry: The classic libertarian discussion on property rights, actually, is that the United States is a great example of the stability strong government protection of property rights can provide. Again, no nation is perfect, and the USA was hardly so with the removal of the Indians and with slavery. We have had a history of lynchings. We execute citizens. None of these things are supported by libertarian philosophy.
Additionally, (and I wish I could attribute this as a quote, but can’t remember where I got it from) at the core of libertarianism is the assertion “You own yourself”. In the libertarian view, if you own yourself, you can do whatever you like with your life, so long as you don’t violate the same of another- you may not initiate force or fraud against another. Again, the proper role of a strong government is to protect individuals against those who would initiate force or fraud against others. And, understanding that when help is needed in seconds, police arrive in minutes, libertarians believe the right to self-defense is absolute.
I see Rand get conflated into libertarianism over and over as completely synonymous. There are great areas of agreement. One huge area of disagreement, where invariably the “I got mine, screw you” comes from, is that Rand viewed altruism as evil. Libertarians do not. While libertarians may argue that altruism generates some level of dependency, libertarians do donate to charity, donate time, volunteer, etc. Libertarians object to the forcible redistribution of wealth. Again, the view that you own yourself- The government’s role is to protect against force, not initiate it.
I think one problem (maybe more philosophical than practical) is that there is some overlap between “We are imperfect, and often wrong at one point before getting things set in a better direction.” and “I’ve got mine, screw you.” The demand for respect of property rights comes only after the indigenous people are dispossessed.
If I took all the money from one of these unpopular Wall Street bankers, then started talking about bygones and how mistakes were made and singing the praises of property rights, it would look awfully self serving.
Incidentally, I’ve read Atlas Shrugged, the Fountainhead (2 or 3 times), and started reading “We The Living” before giving up. The book about Libertarianism I liked best was “Libertarianism in One Lesson” by David Bergland. And, really, one of my favorite philosophical treatises of all time is “On Liberty” by John Stuart Mill. Or, maybe I just imagined those books, as Buzzcut has informed me that I get all of my political reading out of Rolling Stone.