Originally Posted by
Steven Douglas
Roy walked through miles and miles of forest, day after day, alone in the woods and the wilds, subsisting mostly on pine nuts and wild berries. Roy was accustomed to being alone, but that did not mean that he was not lonely. Roy was truly a sad, lonely, lonely soul.
Late one afternoon, while rooting for grubs in a felled and rotting tree, Roy spied a column of smoke rising from a small clearing off in the distance. Roy followed this until it he was close enough to see that he had indeed stumbled onto a small settlement.
Ah! I knew it! Roy thought to himself. My natural liberty rights were being violated all along! Were it not for their violations of my natural liberty rights, I would be at liberty to use the very land they are on now. Well, they don't owe me much, because there is other available land around, but they do owe me, by Dog. Perpetually even.
And with that, Roy took a deep, fortifying breath, and set out toward the settlement, to sort out all the willing payers from the evil would be thieves who were oppressing him.
As Roy addressed the several families of settlers as they sat around the fire, a kindly old woman ladled a nice hot bowl of soup for Roy from the large cast iron cauldron that was suspended over the fire.
Roy thanked the old woman, and patiently explained the deprivation he was now suffering because of the natural liberty rights these settlers had deprived him of, given that he would have been at liberty to use this land if were it not for them. Everyone listened intently, politely - wide eyed even, and with rapt interest. Roy felt that he was making progress, and breathed an inner sigh. At last, he felt that he might be witnessing the seeds of a possible dawn of a non-oppressive utopia.
When Roy had finally finished saying his peace, there was silence in the camp. Finally, one of the settler children, a young boy of about 13 years of age with an inquisitive look on his face, approached Roy. In the boy's hand was a long piece of cloth, and in the bottom of that cloth a rock, which the boy brought full circle, with one deft move, into the center of Roy's forehead. This caused Roy to fall backward, unconscious, into the cauldron.
Poor Roy had stumbled onto a rare discovery - the unknown surviving descendants of the Donner Party, who lived by an entirely set of deprivation-based rules of their own. When the freshly provisioned camp broke for higher ground the next day, they decided to deed the land to Roy, including the hole they had dug for his bones, free of charge.
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