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The damage Rousseau has done... Give me Locke and hands off my bought and paid for hat rest.

• yamtaddle 4y ago
  If we're going with Locke, you better be using all your land productively if you want to retain ownership. [EDIT] For those who've not read him (the Second Treatise is, if not great philosophy, at least a clear, engaging, relatively-quick read, and is the work of his that comes up the most) Locke notices, as many have, that land ownership is kind of screwy under many otherwise-liberal frameworks of political and economic thinking, and justifies it by proposing that adding labor to land is what renders it fit for private ownership, by improving it (in terms of productivity or utility-to-people) beyond its "natural" state. Like most of the rest of the work, this comes off rather as Locke deciding which things he likes first, then going back and constructing the reasoning to justify them under his "natural law" framework, while studiously ignoring any branches of that reasoning that may head any direction he doesn't like—but, regardless, that's his take: input increasing productivity/utility is what justifies private land ownership.