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All of this talk about the state of nature and natural rights drives me a little crazy. Locke puts forward his theory that the labor we expend on something makes it ours. If we plant a field, it becomes ours. The "Law of reason makes the Deer, that Indian's who killed it." But he's completely wrong about this. The historical fact is that the Indian in question, the one who killed a deer, lived in a society. That society had developed rules about property, and probably did not recognize the deer as belonging to the person who killed it at all. It is far more likely that the rules of property developed in a way that guaranteed the survival of the group. The Indian who killed the deer probably had a claim to part of it, but others in the group had a claim to part of it as well.

Locke is imposing individualistic ideas from 17th-century England on people in other societies and cultures. He is universalizing ideas and attitudes about property found in his own situation instead of looking to see what other cultures have actually been like.

If you look around the world you will see that people have always existed in groups; and property rights in early societies (societies without government as we know it) included rules that guarantee the survival of the group. The whole notion of individuals wandering about claiming pieces of land or the animals they killed is completely ahistorical. For thousands of years people lived in small hunting and gathering societies. In those societies people had no concept of private property similar to our own.

Even as a thought experiment, Locke's state of nature is a failure. If we ask what people in groups without government would actually have thought was a fair way to control or allocate or divide up property, it is most likely that they would have wanted rules that would benefit the group as much as the individual. Anyone who thinks that they would have come up with rules similar to the classical liberal or modern libertarian rights of property is nuts.