ABSTRACT
The root idea of the labor theory is that people are entitled to hold, as property, whatever they produce by their own initiative, intelligence, and industry. It is an idea which, once enunciated in the context of natural rights theories of the seventeenth century, has seemed nearly inescapable and self-evident. There are several distinct arguments in Locke for a labor theory of primitive acquisition, and they involve two distinct conceptions of the root idea that labor entitles one to property: that such rights derive from prior property rights in one’s body and its labors; and that such rights are required, in justice, as a return for the labore’s pains. The principle of desert can settle when people deserve property rights in the products of their labor, and then people will have a plausible reformulation of the labor theory. This means the penalty clause of the desert principle provides a strong ground for tax and compensation requirements on entrepreneurs.
