Locke on Private Property

Locke’s Central Question

How can something become “mine” in a world that, at first, belongs to everyone in common, without needing an explicit contract from everyone else?

Two Key Facts About the State of Nature

1. The earth and its resources are held in common.

2. Each person owns themselves.

How Communal Property Becomes Private Property

1. When you work on something held in common, your labor becomes joined to that thing.

2. Your labor is yours, so that thing becomes joined to you, making it yours.

3. Therefore, private property arises without asking everyone’s permission, because labor is the moral bridge from common resources to individual ownership.

Two Provisions

1. Spoilage Limitation

You cannot take more than you can use before it spoils.

2. Enough and as Good As

You must leave enough for everyone else, and it must be as good as what you took.

Is Inequality Legitimate?

Locke’s theory allows for inequality through the introduction of money.

The basic argument is:

1. Money does not spoil.

2. There is lots of money out there, and it is all the same.

3. Once you start operating in a money system, you are consenting to a system where some people may have more money than others.

Why Government?

1. In the state of nature, people still have the right to property, but the means to protect their property are limited.

2. Governments exist to allow people to better protect their property, broadly construed.

3. Therefore, government is legitimate only if it protects those property rights.

Questions

1. What does it mean to mix one’s labor with something, and why does that give me a right to the whole thing? If I cut a board out of a log, why do I get a right to the whole board instead of merely the value I have added to the board?

2. How demanding should the “Enough and as Good As” proviso be? What happens when at first there is enough, but then later there is not enough? Think, for example, about housing shortages.

3. Do we really consent to enter into a market economy just because we are born into a market economy?

4. Should a person be able to use property that others have not improved upon? Think of squatters. They enter into unused buildings and live there. Should they be allowed to do this?

5. Locke’s theory seems to imply the Labor Theory of Value, the idea that what makes something valuable is how much labor is put into it. Economists now mostly reject the Labor Theory of Value. Why might they reject it? Does this create a problem for Locke’s theory?