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Let me interrupt here for a minute. I want to go back to something that Dee and John and Vera were arguing about a few minutes ago.

Dee was claiming that in the state of nature, prior to ownership, natural resources are simply there. No one owns them and everyone has a right to take ownership of them. Through labor or occupancy (or some other series of actions) anyone can acquire an EXCLUSIVE right to, say, a piece of land. John agreed that everyone in the state of nature has a USE right to natural resources, but claimed that stronger rights would have to be limited by a strong proviso that protected non-owners. Otherwise, he claimed, a few people could take exclusive ownership of all the valuable resources and reduce the others to utter dependence. That, he claimed, was morally absurd. Vera claimed that it was simply magical thinking to believe that some series of actions could confer an exclusive right on anyone when resources are scarce.

Now, Dee's view is similar to the views of Hugo Grotius in the 17th century and Roger Pilon at the Cato Institute today. Another 17th-century figure, Samuel Pufendorf took a view something like Vera's. He could not see how individual actions, in the absence of an agreement, could create exclusive property rights.

Suppose we follow up on Pufendorf's point about an absence of agreement. What if there were an agreement about property rights? That puts us back in contractarian territory. What if we set aside the notion of property rights created by individual action and think for a moment about rights created by a hypothetical agreement.

We have already introduced several contractarian writers? What do they say about property? Can they help?