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This is an old idea. Somehow a person in an imaginary state of nature goes out and does something that makes them the owner of land in a very strong sense of ownership. They end up with exclusive rights to resources over which they have almost unlimited control.

This is magical thinking! Pure hocus pocus -- a blatant rationalization for existing power relationships. The powers that be need some way to justify having ripped off everyone else by taking control of all the valuable natural resources. So their hired brains make up a story by which their imaginary ancestors in an imaginary state of nature went forward and did something -- nobody knows quite what -- that made them the owners of the land and everything else. At best this is a fantasy. At worst it's just a cover up for theft.

How is this magical process supposed to have occurred? What exactly is it that people are thought to have done in the state of nature that made them owners in a strong sense? I'm talking about full ownership here, the kind of thing that classical liberals and modern libertarians advocate.

Locke said that everyone owned their own labor and, therefore, when he or she mixed it with a natural resource, the resource became theirs. But why? Nozick was honest enough to ask why someone who did that didn't simply lose their labor -- like what happens when you mix a liquid you own with the sea. You don't end up owning the sea, you simply lose your liquid.

Nozick's theory requires what he called a principle of justice in acquisition. Fine. But he said almost nothing about what principle of acquisition he favored, and he gave very little justification for any such principle. Basically he outlined a kind of theory -- what he called an "entitlement" theory in which present property holdings are justified because of a history of legitimate acquisitions and legitimate transfers. But he gave no specifics. He made the point that there could be a theory very different from that of Rawls and very different from utilitarianism. OK. That's true. But beyond that he offered very little.

Or do we deserve some reward because we have created value by working with a natural resource? Lawrence Becker believes that a kind of property right can be justified on the basis of desert. You know, maybe he's right. I think he may have something there, but it would be a limited right and not at all what the classical liberals and libertarians want to establish.