Labor theory of property

The theory has been used to justify the homestead principle, which holds that one may gain whole permanent ownership of an unowned natural resource by performing an act of original appropriation.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau later criticized this second step in Discourse on Inequality, where he argues that the natural right argument does not extend to resources that one did not create.

For example, natural rights thinker Lysander Spooner,[4] says that an apple taken from an unowned tree would become the property of the person who plucked it, as he has labored to acquire it.

Tucker argued that "in the case of land, or of any other material the supply of which is so limited that all cannot hold it in unlimited quantities, these should only be considered owned while the individual is in the act of using or occupying these things.

Locke held that individuals have a right to homestead private property from nature by working on it, but that they can do so only "...at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others".

[7] The proviso maintains that appropriation of unowned resources is a diminution of the rights of others to it and would be acceptable only so long as it does not make anyone worse off than they would have been before.

The phrase "Lockean Proviso" was coined by political philosopher Robert Nozick and is based on the ideas elaborated by John Locke in his Second Treatise of Government.

Instead, property rights must be recognized in first-comers (or their contractual transferees) in order to avoid the omnipresent problem of conflict over scarce resources.

Labor is a type of action, and action is not ownable; rather, it is the way that some tangible things (e.g., bodies) act in the world.Judith Jarvis Thomson points out that the act of laboring makes Locke's argument either an appeal to desert, in which case the reward is arbitrary-"Why not instead a medal and a handshake from the president?

[13][14][15] Ellen Meiksins Wood provides a number of critiques of Locke's labor theory of property from a Marxist perspective.

This in turn requires the erasure (mentally and usually in brutal reality) of the people already living beyond the frontier and drawing their sustenance from the land in question."