You probably believe you own things. Your phone, your car, maybe even your home. This seems so obvious it barely registers as a belief at all. But the idea that individuals can own parts of the earth—truly own them, with rights that governments must respect—is surprisingly recent.

For most of human history, land belonged to gods, kings, or communities. The notion that a person could mix their labor with soil and thereby make it exclusively theirs would have struck most cultures as bizarre, even dangerous. Yet this single philosophical move, articulated by John Locke in 1689, helped dismantle feudalism, justify colonial expansion, and create the economic system we now call capitalism.

Locke's argument sounds almost childishly simple. You own your body. Your labor belongs to you. When you mix your labor with something unowned, you extend your ownership to include that thing. Pick an apple from a wild tree? It's yours. Clear a forest and plant crops? That land becomes your property.

This was revolutionary because it grounded ownership in individual effort rather than divine right or royal decree. Medieval kings claimed land belonged to them because God willed it. Locke said no—property arises from what you do, not who you are. This flipped the entire social order. Suddenly, the peasant who worked the land had a stronger moral claim than the aristocrat who merely inherited it.

But Locke added crucial caveats that often get forgotten. You could only appropriate property if you left 'enough and as good' for others. You couldn't let things spoil or go to waste. These limits were supposed to prevent hoarding. The problem? Locke then introduced money—something that doesn't spoil—and argued this dissolved the waste limitation. Accumulation became unlimited, and the philosophical door to modern capitalism swung wide open.

Takeaway

Ownership feels natural because we've inherited a specific argument that makes it seem so. The labor theory of property isn't a discovery about reality—it's a persuasive philosophical construction with particular winners and losers.

For centuries, English villages shared common lands. Peasants grazed animals, gathered firewood, and gleaned leftover crops from fields they didn't own. This wasn't charity—it was a legal right, embedded in custom and enforced by courts. Commons weren't wastelands; they were economic infrastructure for the poor.

Beginning in the 16th century and accelerating dramatically in the 18th, these commons were 'enclosed'—fenced off and converted to private property. The philosophical justification? Locke's labor theory. Landowners argued that by improving the land—draining marshes, planting hedgerows, implementing new farming techniques—they were mixing their labor with it. The commons, they claimed, were inefficiently used. Privatization would increase productivity.

What actually happened was mass displacement. Millions of rural people lost access to resources their families had depended on for generations. They became wage laborers, migrating to cities to work in factories. This wasn't an unfortunate side effect—it was the point. Capitalism requires people with nothing to sell but their labor. The enclosure movement, wrapped in the respectable language of property rights and improvement, manufactured that workforce.

Takeaway

Property rights don't just protect existing ownership—they can be wielded to redistribute resources from commons to private hands, all while sounding like a defense of natural justice.

Locke wrote about land and apples. He never imagined someone 'owning' a melody, a gene sequence, or a software algorithm. Yet intellectual property law claims to extend the same logic: you created something through mental labor, therefore you own it.

The analogy strains immediately. When I take your apple, you no longer have it. When I copy your song, you still have it too. Intellectual property isn't about preventing theft in any traditional sense—it's about granting monopoly control over patterns of information. This requires active enforcement: lawyers, lawsuits, digital rights management, international trade agreements.

The tensions are everywhere. Pharmaceutical companies hold patents on life-saving drugs while people die for lack of affordable treatment. Academic publishers charge universities to access research those same universities funded. Tech giants build empires on software patents that critics argue stifle innovation. Each controversy reveals the same underlying question: does the labor theory of property actually apply to the realm of ideas? Or have we stretched a 17th-century argument far past its breaking point?

Takeaway

Intellectual property shows what happens when a philosophical framework gets applied beyond its original domain. The intuitions that feel compelling for physical objects start to feel arbitrary—even absurd—when applied to information.

Locke's labor theory didn't describe a pre-existing truth about ownership. It constructed a new way of thinking that served particular interests—commercial classes against aristocracy, colonizers against indigenous peoples, eventually corporations against commons of all kinds.

Understanding this history doesn't tell you what property rules we should have. But it dissolves the illusion that current arrangements are natural or inevitable. Property is philosophy made concrete, and philosophies can be revised.