Everything about The Labor Theory Of Property totally explained
The
labor theory of property is a
natural law theory that holds that property originally comes about by the exertion of labor upon natural resources. (This isn't to be confused with a
labor theory of value).
In his
Second Treatise on Government, the philosopher
John Locke asked by what right an individual can claim to own one part of the world, when, according to the
Bible, God gave the world to all humanity in common. He answered that persons own themselves and therefore their own labor. When a person works, that labor enters into the object. Thus, the object becomes the property of that person.
Locke argued in support of
individual property rights as "
natural rights". Locke argued that a landowner's property was "his" because he'd worked for it. Locke held that this relation between labor and ownership pertained only to property that was unowned before such labor took place.
Land in its original state would be considered unowned by anyone, but if an individual applied his labor to the land by farming it, for example, it becomes his property. Merely placing a fence around land rather than using the land enclosed wouldn't bring property into being according to most natural law theorists. For instance, economist
Murray Rothbard stated:
» If Columbus lands on a new continent, is it legitimate for him to proclaim all the new continent his own, or even that sector 'as far as his eye can see'? Clearly, this wouldn't be the case in the free society that we're postulating. Columbus or Crusoe would have to use the land, to 'cultivate' it in some way, before he could be asserted to own it.... If there's more land than can be used by a limited labor supply, then the unused land must simply remain unowned until a first user arrives on the scene. Any attempt to claim a new resource that someone doesn't use would have to be considered invasive of the property right of whoever the first user will turn out to be.(
Man, Economy, and State).
The labor theory of property doesn't only apply to land itself, but to any application of labor to nature. For example,
Lysander Spooner, says that an apple taken from an unowned tree would become the property of the person who plucked it, as he's labored to acquire it. He says the "only way, in which ["thewealth of nature"] can be made useful to mankind, is by their taking possession of it individually, and thus making it private property." (Law of Intellectual Property)
However, some, such as
Benjamin Tucker have not seen this as creating property in all things. Tucker argued that "in the case of land, or of any other material the supply of which is so limited that all can't hold it in unlimited quantities," these should only be considered owned while the individual is in the act of using or occupying these things.
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