By Aitor Calero García
Once upon a time, in a small and remote village across the mountains, in a faraway country, there was a small rural school. It was one of those schools with children of different ages together in a single classroom, a village school like any other, but this is a minor detail. It had a strict teacher. However, everybody in the village loved the teacher, as she was just and fair and she cared very much for her pupils. She was the kind of teacher who gave advice like “you always have to not live beyond your means.”
John Locke is the “father” of property rights theory, and continues to be referenced in defense of private property. In the second volume of his Two Treatises of Government, Locke specified the conditions that must be satisfied in order for property to be deemed legitimate. Initially, any property taken from “the commons” (public or collective property) had to be based on one’s labor that was expended to improve that property. (While Locke focused on landed property, his argument applies more generally.)
