Yesterday we looked at what Thomas Hobbes had to say about private property Private Property as a Commodity (and a derivative at that) Part V
John Locke labors for a living
       John Locke (1632 – 1704) had a more mellow take on the original “State of Nature” than did Hobbes and, as a result, his theory about the social contract is more benign and less cynical. He does believe in the right to private property and goes at great lengths to describe how men earn their property by their labor. In his 2nd of Two Treatises on Civil Government, Chapter V, “Of Property,” Section 27, he states,
       “The labor of his body and the work of his hands we may say are properly his. Whatsoever he removes out of the state that nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labor with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property” (Locke [1690], 329).
       This sounds like he is talking about personal possessions as property, but then in Section 32, he says, “But the chief matter of property being now not the fruits of the earth, and the beasts that subsist in it, but the earth itself, as that which takes in and carries with it all the rest, I think it is plain that property in that, too, is acquired as the former. As much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property” (Locke [1690], .332).” I am arguing that his conclusion does not necessarily follow from his premise.
       All the improvements that people have made by their labor are still only upon the fruits of the land, not the land itself. A person can take as much from the land as he wants, and fashion them into anything he wants, and call those his possessions, his personal property, but the land remains only the land, an arbitrary enclosure of a measurement on the face of the earth. He can’t take it with him to market, and he can’t pick it up and store it somewhere else. He has not really improved it because after he has done with using it, and has moved on to greener pastures, it remains as it was before he found it, with only the potential for someone else to use it. (I realize that the agricultural argument maintains that cultivated land has been improved, but with the anti-ecological practices of modern agribusiness, farmlands are less sustainable after use. But even without that, not all land use is agricultural and any new use of the land has to start all over from scratch.)
       Land (real estate) values are an arbitrary economic social construct, invented by men who wanted to claim and then resell the land for their own profit. Calling a donkey a “horse” does not a horse make, and calling land “property” commits the same fallacy. I will elaborate on that theme later, but first, let us hear from another philosopher, David Hume.
      Wednesday: "David Hume Understand Us."
My rants on racial identity began on July 9th
My rants on private property began on July 14th

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