| | Okay, Ted.
I haven't read the thread in entirety (nor the ancillaries). I will do that before responding after this.
I do, like James Donald, offer a special kind of "lynching" (a kind that doesn't alarm reasonable folks) as evidence of the rule of law in primitive society. Watch toddlers. They don't get alarmed if they see one toddler take from another, only to get bum-rushed by the victim or his impromptu diaper-posse`. I wish I had YouTube to back this up. I'll be that dozens of hours of searching would reveal that children understand fairness before age 2. Check this out:
I find gas lines in the ground now. It's my job. Before folks dig in the ground, I get called to their house to show them where the underground gas lines are. I paint the grass with yellow dash-lines and I place little flags along the direction of the gas line. Recently, I finished a job and got into my car.
While doing this job, a mother had come out and warned me that her little 2 year-old girl loves to uproot yard flags and collect them. As I got in the car I noticed a 2-year old girl come out the front door into the yard. She saw the "pretty" yellow flags and had plans to appropriate them. She slowly walked up to one of the flags with the intention to pull it out of the ground.
Then she looked up at me in the car and realized that I was looking straight at her. Like a deer in head-lights, she froze. As long as I looked at her, she would not move. I did not look at her scornfully, but with simple curiosity as to what she might do next.
She must've been watching me put the flags in and she humanly understood that it was my intention for those flags to stay in the ground. In order to perform a rudimentary psychological experiment, I made it appear to this toddler that I was no longer interested in what happens to those flags. I looked away and only used peripheral vision to ascertain what was going on in the front yard of this home.
The little one would take a few steps toward the flag and then look up at me. Confirmed by my averted gaze that I was still uninterested, she would reach down and strenuously pull up on the flag until she pulled it out of the ground. Once she was reasonably sure I was no longer interested she, in short time, was walking around waving her new yellow flags. Now, that's rudimentary homesteading right there.
Without be able to say more than 50 words or whatever, this diaper-laden midget understood property rights and a rudimentary rule of law (do not taketh -- or, at least be very careful when you taketh -- away that which another hath originally intended for their own use).
Ed
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