Rights to Land

Here's a comment on land-owner's rights which takes in, not only current argumetns, but also negates quarrels over land titles which have endured for centuries. It appears in Tyler Cowen's Marginal Revolution blog:

No one really has any claim to any land beyond what force will allow. Basically, if you can hold on to a piece of land by military means, it's yours. This may piss off a lot of people, but it's the reality. Don't like it? Bring a bigger army.
Then the other side brings an even bigger one. Eventually (and theoretically), the winner is "whoever the UN backs", since that's going to be the biggest army there is right now. It basically becomes an "armed forces arms race".
These things are not stated directly by politicians or the media, and there's this twisted sense of "indigenous ownership". It's all just land, and we're all just people.

People spread out a long time ago. How long does it take for a people to have a "real" claim to a land? 100 years? 500? 1000? What if that "people" was a bunch of different former nationalities? Haplogroups? Languages? It could go on forever, and these things just aren't a useful basis for land claims or policy. It's just plain divorced from reality.
No one owns anything. You keep land because: a) no one can kick you out or b) no one cares that you're there. There's no inherent right. No group is "truly" indigenous. All we've got is "who lived there last" and maybe "who we think lived there longest". Neither of those things imbue people or land with any sort of magical pixie dust that says they belong together. That's just the unspoken reality of it.

Finally, it makes the often laughable assumption that some "group" is really a pure representation of something, not taking into account historical migration (into the areas thought to belong to that "group"), interbreeding, and genetic drifting. How would you even determine who *really* gets some sort of claim? Do a test for haplogroup/type on every person that says something is theirs?

No one really has any claim to any land beyond what force will allow. Basically, if you can hold on to a piece of land by military means, it's yours. This may piss off a lot of people, but it's the reality. Don't like it? Bring a bigger army. Then the other side brings an even bigger one. Eventually (and theoretically), the winner is "whoever the UN backs", since that's going to be the biggest army there is right now. It's basically becomes an "armed forces arms race". These things are not stated directly by politicians or the media, and there's this twisted sense of "indigenous ownership". It's all just land, and we're all just people. People spread out a long time ago. How long does it take for a people to have a "real" claim to a land? 100 years? 500? 1000? What if that "people" was a bunch of different former nationalities? Haplogroups? Languages? It could go on forever, and these things just aren't a useful basis for land claims or policy. It's just plain divorced from reality. No one owns anything. You keep land because: a) no one can kick you out or b) no one cares that you're there. There's no inherent right. No group is "truly" indigenous. All we've got is "who lived there last" and maybe "who we think lived there longest". Neither of those things imbue people or land with any sort of magical pixie dust that says they belong together. That's just the unspoken reality of it. Finally, it makes the often laughable assumption that some "group" is really a pure representation of something, not taking into account historical migration (into the areas thought to belong to that "group"), interbreeding, and genetic drifting. How would you even determine who *really* gets some sort of claim? Do a test for haplogroup/type on every person that says something is theirs?

Posted by: AyeCarumba at Jun 22, 2009 9:23:45 PM