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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025

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The innate possession instinct only applies to chattels, not land. (And only questionably applies to more chattels than you can carry). Given how much of libertarian dispute resolution comes down to "the landowner decides what to allow on his land", you need to justify property in land to get a workable libertarianism. This is the hard part of libertarian ethics - particularly if (like most libertarians) you are dependent on the goodwill of people who benefit from the existing pattern of land ownership. Our moral instincts about land ownership come from our views on the proper relationship between warrior elites (the original landowners) and peasants.

Locke/Nozick come up with a theory which makes sense, but if taken seriously requires the Norman robbers and their successors in title to give back the stolen land of England, and the parts of the United States where the Indians practiced a minimal level of land stewardship to be returned to the original owners.

If you want to justify your land title based on the lapse of time since the last time the land was stolen, then you have the problem that the State's rights to sovereignty over the land are just as ancient.

Ayn Rand dodges the issue by accepting that moral rights in land stem from the sovereign granting the original land title.