Phil Elmore: Individual Authoring Services

You Can't Live Yesterday
The Folly of Land Claims, Reparations, and Historical Revisionism

Reason magazine's November 2000 issue includes an article entitled Stale Claims: How long should the law nurse old grievances?. Included in the article was the following passage:

Statutes of limitation and of repose, and their parallel doctrines in other branches of the law, have been around for a very long time. Thus time deadlines combined with adverse possession to help lay rest to uncertainty over land rights. Claims arising under the old system of equity (which grew up alongside common law) had to be pressed diligently or would be subject to the defense of "laches." And a "doctrine of acquiescence" meant that incorrectly drawn political boundaries could be rendered correct by the peaceful passage of time. "The best interests of society require that causes of action should not be deferred an unreasonable time," explained a court in 1871. "This remark is peculiarly applicable to land titles. Nothing so much retards the growth and prosperity of a country as insecurity of titles to real estate. Labor is paralyzed where the enjoyment of its fruits is uncertain; and litigation without limit produces ruinous consequences to individuals." [emphasis added]

Litigation without limit produces ruinous consequences to individuals. Repeat that sentence a couple of times, because it is true, and because our popular culture has forgotten it. The single greatest threat to modern society is the omnipresent divorce of individual responsibility for individual action, and the judge presiding over this divorce could not be better represented than by the ugly, grasping assaults of Native American land claims.

For years now, Native Americans have pressed their hysterical claims to land long owned by people who are not the descendants of long-dead Native Americans. The alleged rationale behind these claims is that since segments of the United States -- indeed, most if not all of the country -- were unjustly taken from individuals who lived 200 years ago, descendants of those wronged individuals should be awarded the land as it exists today. Never mind that the individuals wronged are dead, that their children are dead, or that their children are dead; never mind that the descendants of the Evil White European Aggressors have also logged several generations worth of dead relatives. No logic need apply; it is enough that one group of people long ago did something we now consider unjust to another group of people long ago. The Political Correctness of the present day is deemed enough justification to right the wrongs of the past.

This, obviously, is self-destructive folly, and it is the result of viewing people as groups or categories instead of individuals. The only people responsible for killing Native Americans 200 years ago have been dead themselves for most of those 200 years. Attempting to correct the past through the lens of the present may be attractive to proponents of "social justice" (a concept that seeks politically-correct justice regardless of the number of innocent individuals hurt by discriminatory reparations to categories of people), but it cannot and will not result in anything other than the destruction of our entire society. For that matter, many of those who seek to take the property of others using centuries-old injustices as a weapon are simply acting out of envy and bitterness. They want to possess what others have, and this is an expedient means to that end.

Envy aside, the problem with reliving the past by today's standards is that it never ends. Contemporary culture changes constantly, and the actions and standards of our ancestors seem increasingly primitive or unenlightened. I believe we do learn as a people, and in general, we improve from generation to generation regarding what we know about ourselves and the world around us. But to attempt to administer reparations to people living today on the basis of their ancestors' tribulations is to invite the deconstruction of all that we have achieved.

Most land today belongs to someone, be it an individual, a corporate entity, a government, or some combination thereof. I've heard it said that ownership of land is morally wrong because to own land, you first must take control of it and deny its use to everyone else. Even if that's true, the point is moot. Initial control of all land in our country was taken tens or hundreds of years ago. Today, if you want land, you must buy it. The owners of land today are legitimate by virtue of the intervening decades or centuries; even if they came by that land illegally or immorally a hundred or more years ago, their claims are valid because they are "rendered correct by the peaceful passage of time." To render those claims invalid now would be to destroy hundreds if not thousands of lives, to force innocent people from their homes, and to place huge areas of property in a destructive state of permanent uncertainty.

What does this mean? It means people aren't always nice to each other, and if my ancestors treated your ancestors badly 200 years ago, that sucks, but there's nothing you can do about it now. That is simply the nature of reality: you cannot relive the past, no matter how convinced you are that they were wrong and you are right.

Dismiss the concept behind statutes of limitation and you create an anarchic state in which no one dares produce anything or build anything, because no one knows when a past injustice could be used as justification to take what has been accomplished by others. The entire moral concept behind capitalism is that people are entitled to the product of their own labor. Use the past to deny that, and you create injustice rather than cure it. Imagine the destruction that would be wrought if all property rights were declared void overnight. Realize that land claims and similar attempts to relive the past by the standards of today threaten to do just that, piece by piece.

Reparations for slavery in the United States, or indeed reparations for any injustice perpetrated by one group against another group, are another example of the injustice of reliving the past. You do not "cure" unfair discrimination, for example, by shifting discrimination to another group of innocent individuals. And that is what Whites living today are: INNOCENT of the crime of enslaving Blacks. Unless you own a plantation stocked with slaves, you are NOT guilty of the crimes of your ancestors. Justice is NOT forcing the sins of the mother on the daughter, the sins of the father on the son, or the sins of the ancestors on their great-great-descendants.

Was evil committed in the past? Yes. Can we do anything about it today? NO. All we can do is learn from history and do our best as human beings not to repeat the crimes of our ancestors. Slavery is wrong. Therefore, we do not keep slaves today. Taking people's property is wrong. Therefore, we do not take people's property from them today.

Justice deferred is justice denied, as the old saying goes. And like it or not, justice was denied to slaves and Native Americans in the past. Life is about dealing with what is, not what we wish it could be. And while the past contains valuable lessons for the present, it must not serve as the justification for committing injustice against blameless individuals today. The impulse to relive the past is ultimately self- destructive, and will do nothing but harm us.

You do not placate groups by harming individuals. You do not create justice by committing further injustice. You do not use the billy club of the legal system to deprive the innocent of their property in order to send the message that force is wrong.

If you do, you are guilty, today.