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 I want to introduce a question that I don't think Dee has dealt with in her arguments for strong property rights.In his Second Treatise of Government, the English philosopher John Locke began with the assumption that God gave the earth to people in common. It was therefore necessary to justify turning natural resources into private property. Locke claimed that people could justifiably do this because each person had property in his own person. (Dee has said something like this.) When someone removed something from the state of nature, he mixed his labor with it, and it became his -- "at least where there is enough, and as good left in common for others." This last qualification is sometimes called the Lockean Proviso. Even if we grant everything else in Dee's argument (and I'm not sure I would), we still have to ask whether the proviso is satisfied today? In our society all the land and natural resources are already owned. What does that mean for the proviso? If it means that the proviso cannot be satisfied, then we have to treat property differently. |
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