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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;cladking, post: 1345516, member: 68&quot;]There&#039;s another point as well.</p><p><br /></p><p>I don&#039;t want to weigh in on the side of &quot;looting cultural heritage&quot; and do not approve of smuggling and breaking laws.&nbsp; But look at the law that made this coin the property of the Italian government.&nbsp; It says that any artifact found in Italy belongs to the Itaian government.&nbsp; Just who died and made the Italian government heir to everything.&nbsp; Who died and took away the property rights of the person who owned the land on which the artifact was found. </p><p><br /></p><p>If the law was fair it would read that only the Italian government had right of first refusal on the coin.&nbsp; If they wanted it at then let them pay the finder and the owner of the land some sort of commission or reward.&nbsp; Who exactly determines what is &quot;worthy&quot; of being an artifact and what is just bric-a-brac.&nbsp; Who profits when coins are confiscated from Italian citizens and then never go on display or into a museum.&nbsp; Who has possession of those hundreds of collections confiscated from German citizens.&nbsp; Are they just turned over to rich people and the well connected.&nbsp; Are they passed out as change at the museum.</p><p><br /></p><p>I can understand the willingnbess of the US to enter into treaties with foreign governments on a subject so important as &quot;cultural heritage&quot; but does our signing of such treaties include the hidden arrest of a person who didn&#039;t actually steal anything.&nbsp; Yes, if he&#039;s guilty of breaking laws then&nbsp; he should be charged and prosecuted but &quot;dealing in stolen goods&quot; is not exactly trading in stolen goods whjen in actuality someone merely prevented the Italian gpovernment from stealing something from its own people and the &quot;dealer in stolen goods&quot; didn&#039;t hit anyone over the head.</p><p><br /></p><p>The bottom line is this is an American citizen who is in technical violation of a treaty signed by an one government to support another&nbsp; government.&nbsp; Citizenship now days just means one has the right to eat pink slime but there was a time when &quot;We the People&quot; actually meant something. Who died and turned it into &quot;we the government&quot;?</p><p><br /></p><p>It was &quot;We the People&quot; who fought and died in countless wars to maintain things like property rights.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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