Q & A - I

Homesteading and Conquest 

If Homesteading theory gives right of ownership to whomever began to appropriate land FIRST, is there a Libertarian movement to return land to the Native Americans? Why or why not?
    - Does historic conquest supersede original appropriation? IE, England's conquest of Australia, US westward expansion, European colonialism, etc.

I don't know if there is a libertarian movement for Native American land repatriation. It's possible that there is but I simply am ignorant of it. It's been my personal experience that libertarians are generally pro-indigenous (or rather, anti-State) in regards to the plight of the Native Americans. The "why not" is tricky, and worthy of contemplation. 

The first reason I can think of is that, logically, many non-Natives would lose their land and possessions in a hypothetical repatriation, and thus American libertarians would be against it due to rational self-interest. The second reason is that such repatriation would be extraordinarily complex and difficult to actually happen. Native American tribes would have to be able to prove, without a shadow of a doubt, that they owned the land before other groups of people. The problem here is that it would be difficult to prove such a thing without written documents. We can't expect there to be deeds and bills of sales in every instance, especially when two or more tribes compete for the lands. The result I think we'd see is something like this:

I. The vast majority of Americans being displaced from America.

II. Some groups of Americans, mixed ethnically or otherwise, remaining in America due to a lack of clear land ownership.

III. The few remaining pure and mixed Native American descendants slowly attempt to manage the continent.

A third problem, one not often considered, is what would happen to the infrastructure of America as a whole if a repatriation happened. Much of the physical infrastructure of America is a confusing mix of labor and material from a variety of sources. Since it would be nearly impossible to determine who owns what in such a scenario, we'd likely see much of the physical infrastructure of America completely dismantled and parceled off to non-Native Americans. This, in addition to the departure of the majority of the businesses, schools, and other associations, would immediately turn America into a third world nation. From that point it is likely that the Native Americans, and the others remaining in America, would have to then purchase the goods, services, and immigration of the very people they just removed. A fourth problem is who is and is not considered a Native American. Would mixed peoples count? Would Mexicans count? Would certain Canadians count? This would complicate things even further. It is because of this level of complexity, I don't reckon this to be knot unraveled any time soon. 

Conquest, on the other hand, is more clear cut if it is recent. Recent conquests would not supersede original homesteading and thus repatriation occur, and hopefully the recentness of the conquest would make things more clear than in the case of the Native American. The problem arises when the sands of time obscure the situation. Native tribes were conquering and stealing aplenty in the past, and thus it may not be clear who the truly original owner was.

Take modern Mexico as an example. The US, through war, stole much of Mexican land. Let's say that, for some reason, repatriation would occur. Who would the land go to? The first answer, though false, would be the Mexican nation. This is false because it belonged to someone else before the creation of the Mexican nation. Who did it belong to? Not New Spain, since they took it from the local tribes who lived in those specific areas. If repatriation did occur, it would chop up the land into a multitude of very small city-states based on the tribes who could prove that they originally lived there. And Mexico, as a nation, would hold no claim to those lands. Indeed, much of Mexico would have to be chopped up accordingly. Mexico would be reduced to the original city-state occupied by the Mexica, with the rest of the land going to the various other tribes who lived there before the Triple Alliance and the Spanish conquered them.

The underlying challenge is this: how far down the rabbit hole do we go? War, theft, and plunder are constants in human history. If we followed the challenge of repatriation all the way to its logical end point, we would end up with a large area of land (originally the nation in question) divided into a vast expanse of varying city-states, tribes, and communities. Such an arrangement wouldn't necessarily be negative, but it would be incredibly different than the simplistic outcomes envisioned by many. 

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The Social Contract 

What is the difference between a false "social contract" and a collective agreement among a group? Is it just a matter of scale? Can it be done via representatives?

The core falsehood of the social contract is that, despite the name, it is not a contract at all. A contract can be defined as something along the lines of:

I. A formal, legally binding agreement.

II. A written or spoken agreement that is enforceable by law. 

III. A voluntarily made commitment that holds each party to a specific accountability. 

And so on. We find no such qualities in a so-called social contract. It is neither formal nor voluntary. It is neither written nor verbal. We can't even find such a contract to prove that it exists; it only exists in the minds of certain people. So what's the difference between that social contract and a collective agreement? The latter is an actual agreement. For such a collective agreement to be penned, it would have to be a formal agreement that is preserved in a specific form (written or verbal). It would detail the parties involved (that collection of people), what their agreement is composed of, what are consequences of breaching the contract, and so forth. The difference isn't a matter of scale, so much as it is a difference of essence. One is an actual binding agreement (a contract) and the other (the social contract) is a political theory invented in order to explain the roots of human societies. 

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