OK. I live in California. Once upon a time it was inhabited by people who probably descended from others who crossed the Bering land bridge. I can't trace a clear chain of ownership over their history, but I know that:
* The land was taken from them, forcibly, by Spanish settlers
* Then that land was taken from Spain, forcibly, by Mexico during its war of independence
* Then that land was taken from Mexico, forcibly, by the United States during the Mexican-American war.
Thus every current private deed to land in California is backed not by a chain of voluntary transactions, but by a chain of transactions dating back to an exercise of violent force by the United States, since that is how the United States gained legal authority to recognize such deeds.
If you're alleging that every square inch of land in California was claimed by someone else at the time Spain claimed it, you have to prove that, for every square inch. It is not a foregone conclusion that the presence of native bands meant every inch of land was claimed. Pre-colonization, population densities were low and many bands were mobile.
Moreover, there are numerous legal principles, like the statute of limitations, that a court would consider, that could easily result in your case being thrown out.
In short, your sweeping judgements go against every accepted principle of justice developed over the last two thousands years.
It troubles me that this doesn't cause you pause. You are also focusing on only a single category of property: land, and ignoring the categories of property which you would have even more difficulty making a case of being derived from theft, while not abandoning your original claim that all wealth is derived from force/fraud, which indicates to me that you're not making an honest argument for your position.
And who said anything about taking it to a court? We're talking about morality here -- morally wrong actions don't magically become moral just because they happened years ago, even if a court would say the statute of limitations has expired for legal action. Every inch of land in California was immorally obtained by the United States, and thus there is no moral basis for the current patterns of ownership of that land. Any system which assumes that there is a moral basis must, to be consistent, also openly permit the use of violent force to involuntarily seize property from others, and in fact must consider such use of force to be praiseworthy.
So if you really do believe what you've been advocating, that's what you're committing to.
Spain ceded the land in a treaty, as did Mexico. Sovereignty is not exactly the same thing as land ownership either. So it's highly questionable that a court would agree that a current land title is illegitimate. Your confidence in your position about such a complex topic is not justified by the scope of the research you've done or arguments you've brought forth.
Moreover, the land titles didn't all get voided in these transfers of sovereignty.
>And who said anything about taking it to a court? We're talking about morality here -- morally wrong actions don't magically become moral just because they happened years ago, even if a court would say the statute of limitations has expired for legal action.
Courts are the institution that is tailor made for establishing what is moral. A statute of limitations exists for moral/justice-related reasons. You dismiss all principles of the Western justice system, which has evolved over 2,000 years, to arrive at your reckless condemnation of millions of people.
>Every inch of land in California was immorally obtained by the United States, and thus there is no moral basis for the current patterns of ownership of that land.
You make bold sweeping statements like this that no court would accept for numerous good reasons. But you know better than a jury of your peers and hundreds of years of legal tradition that have carefully weighed the numerous moral repercussions of each detail, right?
>Any system which assumes that there is a moral basis must, to be consistent, also openly permit the use of violent force to involuntarily seize property from others, and in fact must consider such use of force to be praiseworthy.
Another sweeping generalisation based on numerous shaky assumptions. A court can find current land titles legitimate for multiple factors unrelated to and despite of the fact that hundreds of years ago, the sovereignty changed as a result of a war.
The fact that you don't consider the possibility of other factors existing that would be relevant to morality of current land titles, or the possibility that some maintained their land titles during the change of power from Spain to Mexico to the United States, just to insist on a premature sweeping generalization that condemns millions of people, is troubling to me. It seems to be very reckless to those you're condemning, in being unwilling to exhaust all possibilities that you're wrong before condemning them.
Another thing that troubles me is you not abandoning your original position that all property is illegitimate, while making arguments about the legitimacy of only one category of property. This again suggests that you're not making an honest case for your initial position, and are instead trying to find the easiest argument you can make, and hope that I don't challenge you on other types of property. In other words, it indicates you're trying to win the debate rather than than come to a consensus on the truth.
All tangible (real or personal) property is (or rather, is relation created in law to something which is) either naturally occurring like land, or the result of action applied to such a naturally occurring item.
Intangible personal property is a pure creation of law at the expense of everyone else's freedom that doesn't apply to a tangible item.
Our own bodies are "the result of action applied to such a naturally occurring item". We have an absolute right to our bodies according to any modern conception of individual rights in existence.
This idea that any one who has wealth should be presumed guilty of possessing stolen goods based only on a sweeping assumption that all naturally occurring property was acquired through fraud or force is completely unjust, and would never be accepted by a court of law.
Nonsense; neither has any value without the other. They each provide all of the value, which isn't additive.
> We have an absolute right to our bodies according to any modern conception of individual rights in existence.
As most modern systems of values allow restrictions onnbodily autonomy, many including situations in which others have a right to take your life which is the ultimate violation of such autonomy, it's clear that most such systems do not involve absolute rights of the kind you describe.
That's incorrect. A component being necessary doesn't mean it provides all of the value, and the other components have value whether or not a finished good is produced. Labour costs money whether or not the project is completed.
>As most modern systems of values allow restrictions onnbodily autonomy, many including situations in which others have a right to take your life which is the ultimate violation of such autonomy,
You're skirting around the key basis of almost all systems of justice: you do have a right to autonomy as long as you don't violate other's equal right to the same. This is basically the Non Aggression Principle, and it has the effect of maximising personal autonomy.
Many modern legal systems thoroughly limit the autonomy of individuals with regard to suicide, either by directly criminalizing it, by criminalizing any assistance others might provide a suicidal person in achieving that aim (in some systems even criminalizing merely failing to prevent a suicidal person from succeeding), or by authorizing other people to use force to prevent an individual from achieving that aim.
Suicide is an extreme case, but it's an extreme case in which usually no one's autonomy or body except the suicidal person's is involved. If an absolute right to our own bodies where it does not interfere with the rights of others is a key principle of our legal systems, then we should expect our legal systems to place no limitations on it, beyond at most restrictions aimed at preventing others from coercing an individual to commit "suicide", but this is not what we see in almost any modern legal system (if anyone has an example of one which does fit that expectation, I'd be curious to hear it).
That's an edge case for which a stronger argument exists for lack of mental capacity to provide informed consent.
For most actions, the nature of the action does not automatically suggest mental illness or incapacity. If you move away from the edge cases that you're fixating on to bolster your contrarian position, and look at the general pattern of legal rights, you'll see a heavy bias and tendency toward personal autonomy with the exceptions of actions that violate other people's equal right to the same.
So while you're right that societies generally don't provide an absolute right to personal autonomy, if one were to find those conventions that find the most overlap between disparate cultures, you'll see a principle that suggests something inherently natural about social norms that maximize personal autonomy.