Fifty Years Is Enough

"Confine yourself to the present," - Marcus Aurelius

Simple concept: “any claim for ownership for something you do not have in possession is meaningless after 50 years.” This is the same for territory or for objects: if you claim to own it, but you don’t actually have it, then after 50 years you can forget about it.

Similarly: “The people running the world today bear no responsibility for anything more than 50 years earlier.” Acts were done long ago in history, and the perpetrators either paid the price or they didn’t. The winners either gave back their unfair gains, or they didn’t. The loser either got compensation or they didn’t. It is all water under the bridge now.

This has to do with people and ownership and responsibility. The things you have today will all eventually pass on to other people. Are there any things you claim to own that are not in your possession? Say you drop your watch in the woods. Do you still own it? After one year, probably yes. But what about after 10 years? 100 years? A thousand years? At some point your claim to ownership ends, and the object becomes the property of the person who finds it.

I think it is the same with land. A person own an acre and build a cabin on it but then they abandon it. They can rightfully return for some amount of time. Certainly after a few years. But what about 10 years? What about 100 years? At some point the claim for ownership simply does not apply.

Term Limit

As long as something is in your possession, you can own it your entire life. As long as you are living on your property, your ownership is never in doubt. But when you no longer actually have it, there should be a time limit. I am suggesting in the absence of any other rule or agreement, that 50 years should be the maximum that any claim for ownership without possession can extend.

What I am suggesting that 50 years is the maximum term limit on any unobserved relationships. But “unobserved” I mean claims for ownership while not in possession or control. I mean possible liabilities from actions taken which have not been taken in the last 50 years. For legal action of any kind, we look at the most recent 50 years, and that is all. Justification for any legal action must come from events in the last 50 years. Anything before that is simply not acceptable in a court as evidence of anything; they are just interesting historical stories.

Why A Term Limit?

“WE” all live today. The second person plural is talking about people who are alive right now. We live in the now. We have problems now. We should focus on our current problems, and solve our current problems.

“WE” are not people 100 years ago. History is filled with vile and despicable acts. It is also filled with honorable and heroic acts. But history is history, we can’t change it.  But clearly, we did not do them.

Arguments that we should do something today, because of something from history, are a waste of time. Mostly the details are lost to history. Most of the crimes of the past have had attempts to compensate the crime. People have claimed the need for compensation and some have gotten, many have not. After 50 years it is impossible to really sort out who owes what to whom. Most of the actual actors are dead.  Nobody who was actually harmed is around to be paid back.

Ancestral Rights

The claim that person X owns something, or is owed something, because their ancestor owned or was owed it is pure bogosity. A generation is 25 years, and ten generations brings you 1000 great-great-whatevers. People cherry pick one ancestor and say: “that person was owed something and I now I want to collect it.” How many other thousands of people can make the same claim to the same thing?

Things can be passed from parent to child, and it seems legit if both are alive, or a parent wills it to a living child. However, to claim to own something because your genetics are similar to someone hundreds of years ago is bogus.  Sorry.  Gold-digger you may be, but we should simply ignore your attempt to grab more for yourself. Your honor was impugned, you say? How bogus. We know you are just trying to grab something for yourself. You were harmed by that act on someone 200 years ago, and therefor you need compensation. We see through the hollow agenda.

If you possessed it in the past 50 years, lets take a look and compare claims from various litigants. More recent cases should take precedence over older ones. But if the time has been 50 years, then just fugetaboutit.

No person alive today should claim anything about actions that happened to ancestors. The most egregious claim is that people who claim a genetic similarity to Moses claim that  they own a piece of land in the middle east because their ancestors lived there. Marauding armies stormed through the region dozens of times in the intervening years, and you have to a special kind of gullible to believe that that had no effect on ownership rights on the land.

Since I mentioned the middle east, I need to also say the Arab claim to the land is specious. Lots of people immigrated to Israel and set up a government more than 50 years ago. Israel owns the land now, not because of Moses, but because they occupied it for more than 50 years.  Maybe there were Arab adults forcefully moved out. Those people might have a claim, but claim that it should be Arab land because it was Arab land 100 years ago is not a valid concern.

But the world is unfair! Marauding armies move in and take over land. If the take it, and hold it for 50 years, then it is theirs. The army took ownership of the land. For some number of years, people displaced might legitimately claim they should be allowed to have it back. People who actually lived there and were forcefully moved off. Those people have a claim, but when they die, so dies the claim. A person who never lived there really has no claim for ownership of a territory that their ancestor held.

Thieves

It does not seem to matter HOW you lost possession. You might have misplaced it. You might have lost it. It might have been stolen from you. For any reason, if you did not posses the item in question, then after 50 years your claim for ownership has hit it’s term limit.

The theft of land is particularly notable. Throughout history, time and time again, land is taken by one person forcefully from another. Invading armies did just that. Sometimes the previous owners killed, other times simply run off. Take any plot of land, and you would find a history of different owners. Much of North America was owned by indigenous people. There is a famous story about Manhattan being purchased for $24, but we don’t know if the sellers from were actually the real owners. Other sales are disputed, with two parties both claiming ownership of the same plot. Many more were simply taken without compensation of any kind.

I am saying that any dispute more than 50 years old can be completely ignored. If someone drags out a deed from 1866 designating Doc Whiskey as the owner of a plot of land proves nothing, since the land could have been sold many times in the interim. If Doc lived on the land, built a cabin there, or even only visited infrequently, those actions reinforce the ownership.

If it was stolen 50 years ago, it is gone.  Get over it.

Why Fifty Years?

The people on this world are constantly rolling over to new people. The world is generally run by people who are 40 to 60 years old. People 0 to 20 are generally not mature. People 20 to 40 are contributing, but mainly learning the ropes. People 60 to 80 are also contributing, but the main work is being done by youngers. Yes there are famous example of people older and younger who play a large role, but still, for the most part, the world is run by people between 40 and 60.

There is a complete change of running the world every 40 years. Anyone running the world today was not involved in running the world 40 years ago. Again, there are notable exceptions, but by and large 40 years of running the world is most in general.

50 years is two generations approximately. The people running the world today are generally speaking the grandchildren of the people who were running in 50 years ago. And the grandparents 50 years ago and probably all dead today. Ahh, the circle of life.

We like to think about the world in terms of “kinds” of people, like races or cultures. What did the hispanic community do over the centuries.  The asian community.  The native american tribes.   It is helpful to break up the world into cultures, to understand the tides of history.  Do not forget: the each community is replaced every 40 years or so.  They are different people.  An act against a community 100 years ago does not contain any people alive today.  (Again, the community represented by the people running the community, generally aged 40 to 60.)

Something my Grandfather Owned

Let’s say Joe owned a painting and it was stolen. Then say Joe dies. Then, 50 years later, the painting turns up? Does Joe’s grandchild Sam own the painting? This is the essence of the discussion. First lets talk about some easier cases.

If you are walking in the woods, and you drop your watch and lose it. The question is going to be: If someone finds it next year: who owns it? If the watch is lost for a year or two, it would seem to be lost, and no longer belongs to the person. However, if the owner can be found, and it has been a couple years, it seems reasonable that it should be returned to the owner.

10 years: If the painting turned up 10 years later, and the circumstances of the theft are well documented, then it seem reasonable to say that the original owner still owns it. Probably the same owner is around.

Why Favor the Thief?

The thief Tom can steal something, and then 50 years later he legitimately owns it. This is not fair to the original owner. First of all I doubt that the prospect of owning something 50 years from now is really much motivation today, so no I don’t seriously think that this ‘tempts’ thieves to take things. However, if something valuable is stolen, it might be handed down through a family and eventually rightly owned.

It also favors the conquering army who settles people who 50 years later are legitimized.

There is a part of me that says these thieves and invaders should never win! But then I remember, that people change every generation, and after 2 generations there is no real feeling of ownership. Say a 40 year old businessman buys a famous painting, and that painting is stolen by an invading army. 50 years later that business man is 90 years old, and has made it all that time without the painting. It is likely that the original owner is dead. The grandchildren want the painting, but they have never experienced it. Clearly there is value in claiming ownership, but there is no real way they have had the experience of owning it.

Same for land. The grandfather might have lost some land 50 years earlier, but the grandchildren never had any experience of owning it. The theft was an offense to the grandfather, not the grandchildren who never experienced it. People are always stealing from each other, and we need to focus on thefts within the last 50 years. But after 50 years you hit a statute of limitations, and you just let it go. What we have is grandchildren and great-grandchildren arguing about property right they claim to have inherited.

Flow is Part of History

I think there are tides in the affairs of people, and it is impossible to unravel the swirls of a flood. At some point you just admit that what is left when the tide washes out is just what you have.

Each generation divides up the world into parts according to their own logic. Some are born into a wealthy family and have many advantages, particularly rent-free living on property owned by parents. Others are born in quite different circumstances without even a place to reliably sleep at night. Nobody has ever said this was fair by any means. Each life builds on what it can.

Forward

We have many people today who are harmed by many things. We need to focus on those things. Redlining was a real problem that cheated many people, but it was long ago. Yes, this practice was the cause of many blacks being poor today, but causality after 50 years is tenuous. There are so many other factors. Let focus on the problems of today. People are being cheated today, so let’s end that. Let’s try to make the world fair today. People who are born poor today, lets help them, whether their ancestors were affected by redlining or not. There are still echoes of racism in America today which was almost surely caused by actions 100 and 150 years ago. Let’s address the racism today, whether it was “caused” or not.

The fifty year rule is designed to just stop the debates on who owes what to whom that are over 50 years old. These ancient claims are a waste of time. 50 is time to move on. We have plenty of current problems that need resolving. Let’s focus on “OUR” world, which exists today.

Examples

Kennewick Man - a 9000 year old skeleton was found washed out on a bank of the Columbia River in Kennewick, Washington. Four different native American tribes claimed ownership and demanded the skeleton be repatriated and buried. For more than 8600 years nobody cared about this skeleton, and to claim to care about it now is nonsense. it is not even clear that the tribes we have today are anything like the tribes that long ago. This led to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) which makes it criminal offense to traffic in Native American human remains of any age, whether found in a sacred ground, or just washed up on the bank of a river. Over 110,000 remains that cannot be associated with a particular tribe are held in institutions across the United States, as of 2006. The project seeks to enable a process of reconciliation between Native and non-Native peoples, treating different races differently.