Getting Locke straight

He wound up expanding that comment into a separate post, describing the way Locke’s “admixture of labor” standard for initial appropriation (that one appropriates unowned land and “takes it out of the common” by “mixing one’s labor with it,” i.e. altering or improving it in some way) was used in practice to legitimize the theft of native lands in areas colonized by Europeans.

This particular view of (real) property claims was very convenient to the Age of Colonization, since it gave Euro-originating settlers the opportunity to “mix their labor” with “something not already anyone’s property,” which is to say, land that was sustaining non-Europeans...

By Rothbard’s version of the Lockean standard, the overwhelming majority of land titles in the Third World, of latifunderos and other landed oligarchs, are illegitimate, and the land is the rightful property of the peasants whose ancestors cultivated it. In the United States, all absentee claims to presently vacant and unimproved land should be treated as null and void, and land subsequently developed under such title is the present rightful property of the actual homesteader or his heirs and assigns.