| | Blood money and ransom are perfectly good English concepts. The fact that kidnapping is illegal doesn't mean it doesn't happen or that the state will not stoop to paying randsom, at least to jihadists. OJ Simpson got away with murder - but he has been judged liable to pay blood money. The fact that money is used by criminals too does not make money a criminal tool - unless, perhaps, you advocate doing away with paper and coin so that the government may track all financial transactions electronically.
The claim that Osbourn forced anyone into making a collectivist argument is false and ingenuous. The claim was made that Indians have no property rights because their society doesn't have the underlying institutions - and hence there wasw nothing wrong with those who "have" property rights taking Indian land. This was shown to be false - almost all tribes had a concept and an institution of property - most had agriculture, all had fishing and hunting roights. This was shown to be irrelevant. Individuals have the moral right to property so long as they do not forfeit it by crime or lose it in offensive war. Finally, in those circumstances where property was seized from Indians by force of law it was done both in contradiction to the guarantees of the Constitution, and it was done by forcibly treating the indians collectively by "treaty" (where the Indians usually had no authorized party to negotiate to treaties - a chief was seized and made to sign a to him meaningless piece of paper) and Act of Congress.
Congress has no right to create a collective entity in order to strip that entity of its property - at best, Congress could have admiktted Indian nations as States. This is the catch. Indian nations should have been admitted as states, with the provision that all residents, native and settler, would have equal rights before the law. This was always a possibility, but never became an actuality. Indians were treated both as subject and as foreign. They were treated as subhuman, or at leaast inferior to Europeans and Christians. The powers in the East wanted no knowledve of the facts on the ground. Powers in the west were motivated by greed and racism to use every possible excuse to seize Indian land and to drivew off Indian residents. There were certainly criminal actions by Indian braves. Certain tribes were indeed warlike, and by fighting Americans during war or by attacking settlers and tribes they forfeited their rights. But American policy - which is what we are concerned with here - was never one to respect the individual rights of Indians and to bring peaceful tribes into the Union as equals. (This happened only in Hawaii, and only in part, after the sugar plantations used force to overthrow the native monarchy.) There is no excuse for the Indians being treated as rightless individuals. there is no excuse for them being made into collective entities by fiat from Washington DC. There is no excuse for them being treated simulataneously as subject peoples, hence punishable by law, yet also as foreign peoples, without recourse to law themselves. No matter what their own naivete in regards to the leval systems of the Europeans, when the Europeans used those systems it was never to protect the real rights of individuals, it was always in order to abrogate those rights.
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