So how about that? It seems that now the "finders keepers" concept no longer applies. On a big, international scale.
Q: Do you run a socialist-leaning, economically mismanaged European country with good relations and military camaraderie with the United States? Feeling a bit... underfunded, or perhaps just insecure?
A: If your once heavily colonizing nation lost a sunken treasure two centuries ago, and it is discovered and salvaged by entrepreneurs (and their financial backers, though they may have funded it themselves), and if you have some good lawyers, you can reclaim that property.
Spain's last dictator -- Franco -- died in the 1970s (believe it or not), but a tyrannical approach by Spain seems like from pretty harsh tyrannical move to me. It is eschewing market, government and even schoolyard fairness, in a case of free enterprise versus what seems like some pretty blatant governmental collusion. It's not just Spain's shame here: the United States court system decided that Spain deserved the sunken gold back after two centuries, free and clear. As if it cost the salvage company nothing to find the ship and pull up the gold.
The rules have apparently changed, and a some minor type of tyranny (feels major, to the entrepreneurs, perhaps) has been endorsed above the most noble and time-tested economic rule: finders keepers, loser weepers.
Spanish treasure lands after 200 years | Reuters
...The [American-based salvage] company said it would abide by the ruling, although a spokeswoman said it "flies in the face of all legal precedent."
"This a victory for Spain and the United States," lawyer Jose Maria Lancho, who advised the Spanish government in its action against Odyssey, told Reuters.
"For Spain, this sunken ship, this archaeological site, is still a warship and we still have jurisdiction over what has happened to it."
The Spanish government plans to restore, conserve and catalogue the contents of the 17-tonne cargo, which it estimates to be worth 373 million euros ($496 million).
This seems to me to be a case of a few governments (figuratively, and financially) running over some enterprising people, and then backing up over them again. Less doleful, namby-pamby thinkers would call this tyranny. Not the Nazis marginalizing Jews in Poland in the 1940s kind of tyranny, no, but a form of tyranny still. (Like when eminent domain amounts to a local government's abuse of power to put a condo where 500 retirees had lived for decades, or to take people's homes at below-market price in order to put in an interstate off-ramp to please the wealthy investors putting in a new mall. Or something. Kinda like that.)
The state denying reasonable rights and freedoms to people who have not committed any crimes whatsoever is tyrannical, plain and simple. Taking piles of gold, discovered fairly and legally, from those who salvaged it, with scant remuneration (if any?) is tyrannical. If it isn't, then tell me what it is, well short of writing a dissertation on it.
I am just not happy about this. Are you familiar with the economic shorthand, "PIGS"? It identifies the European states which are providing the greatest threat to economic stability in Europe (PIGS: Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and, ahem, Spain) and the countries who are invested in, and connected to, those economies. That would be you, most likely.
Way to hold down the free market spirit of people, Spain and USA! Happy-face fascism is winning the day.
Spain could at least name a government building after the salvage company, Odyssey Marine Exploration. But they won't, I expect. Why should they? They're the government. They determine what's fair, and if you disagree, well, they're the government. Freedom isn't free, and you can't even pay your way to uncovering lost gold without getting jerked over, based on this ludicrous and unjust action.
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