Second Treatise Of Civil Government, V

V (Of Property) - A right to self-preservation means an automatic right to the things necessary for self-preservation: food and shelter, at least.  But where does the concept of "property" come in?

First, we might consider the wild of Nature to be there for public consumption.  But if anyone is actually to make use of, say, the fruit of a tree, he necessarily makes use of it to the exclusion of anyone else's use of it.  Each man naturally has a property claim also on his own body, and so his own labor.  And when his labor adjusts Nature for the purposes of satisfying his needs, he acquires property rights over that portion of Nature to which he applied himself.  Simply put, the man who gathers acorns owns the acorns the moment he gathers them-- common law will get us this far (otherwise he would need the consent of everyone else before claiming possession over so simple a thing.)

These property rights are not unlimited, of course.  A man has no right to possess that which he will not make use of, and so will subsequently go to waste. 

OK, so what about land?  Still simple: working the land confers possession.  And there is plenty of land for each man to find his own parcel to work.  The only exception is that land which has been preserved for public use by the legitimate public authority.  "Subdue the earth and have dominion over it" are a cause and effect.

This could probably have worked forever-- there's plenty of land!  Hell, just use America if it comes to that.  But at some point, this natural development was interrupted by the use of money, to assign the possession of larger pieces of land to fewer people.  This is entirely natural, the fruit of man's cleverness.  Overall, it's a good thing.  At this point, our civilization has developed to the point that 99% of the goods we get from nature are already infused with some kind of human labor to make them happen.  Proof: look at how the native Americans live-- surrounded by as much land as they could care to use, but not living well on it.  And look: we eat bread, not acorns; we wear silk, not skins.  V.43:

It is labour, then, which puts the greatest part of value upon land, without which it would scarcely be worth anything; it is to that we owe the greatest part of all its useful products; for all that the straw, bran, bread, of that acre of wheat, is more worth than the product of an acre of as good land which lies wasted is all the effect of labour.  For it is not barely the ploughman's pains, the reaper's and thresher's toil, and the baker's sweat, is to be counted into the bread we eat; the labour of those who broke the oxen, who digged and wrought the iron and stones, who felled and framed the timber employed about the plough, mill, oven, or any other utensils, which are a vast number, requisite to this corn, from its sowing to its being made bread, must all be charged on the account of labour, and received as an effect of that; Nature and the earth furnished only the almost worthless materials as in themselves.  It would be a strange catalogue of things that industry provided and made use of about every loaf of bread before it came to our use if we could trace them; iron, wood, leather, bark, timber, stone, bricks, coals, lime, cloth, dyeing-drugs, pitch, tar, masts, ropes and all the materials made use of by any of the workmen, to any part of the work, all which it would be almost impossible, at least too long, to reckon up.

And the development of money, which made all this industry go, is easy enough to explain.  A man who did gather more than he could use before it perished would be wise to trade away his surplus for something of a more permanent enjoyment-- even if that thing be a merely aesthetically appealing rock.  Without the possibility of some item or object or material acting as the storage of value, such surplus would never happen-- for it would merely represent wasted effort and labor.

We're watching the re-development of all this in America as we speak.

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I'm having ideological whiplash reading this against 21st century mores.  Suck on this, luddites, eco-warriors, and Gaia worshipers.

Locke is clearly working off of a primitive labor theory of value.  That's good as far as it goes, but without further development it devolves into a disastrous theory and wasteful make-work programs.  But Locke doesn't consider the possibility of non-useful labor at all.  In fact, such a thing could only happen after piggy-backing on an established system of money.  Man, this stuff gets complicated in a hurry.

Love the quoted paragraph, a precursor to the "I, Pencil" essay I discovered sometime last year.

Locke's perspective of the American continent is fascinating.