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| Replies |
 Dee (main path) |
 Ann |
 John |
 Vera |
| Property Rights |
| John Speaking
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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 some sort of private property (although not necessarily the sort that libertarians advocate). Locke claimed that people could justifiably do this because each person had property in his own person. (Dee said something like this when she mentioned self-ownership.) 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 and when the proviso ceased to be satisfied. Is it satisfied today? In our society all the land and natural resources are already owned. What does that mean for the proviso? If the proviso cannot be satisfied today -- or if it has not been satisfied for a long time -- then what becomes of the strong libertarian property rights that Dee advocates? I claim that some sort of compensation was owed to people once the proviso was no longer satisfied. |
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