Locke's Second Treatise of Government Essay

"God gave the world to men in common" is a theme that supports the view that Locke would see property and something that should not be wasted, as waste deprives others. That survival is taken out of the equation tilts the moral balance towards Locke viewing much of the expropriation of land that occurs in South Florida as needless.

There remains the question of spinoff benefits, and this is something that lies at the heart of much debate about land use today. While the proverbial Donald Trump may not need to expropriate that land in order to survive, there are going to be people who work on that land who do support themselves and their families. The landowner is not necessarily the beneficiary of that land's development. On the surface it seems self-evident that if jobs are created that the expropriation should be viewed as acceptable by Locke. However, it is worth considering that there are myriad ways to create jobs. The same development on a piece of vacant land in an area already developed would bring about the same benefits. Unlike in Locke's era, when land was directly connected to survival, modern day job creation often does not rely on development of any specific patch of land (mining industry excepted). Anything done on land in South Florida can be done just about anywhere in the region; expropriation from nature is not necessary. Additionally, even if the development never took place at all, anywhere, there are myriad ways of creating jobs. The development may be a low-hanging fruit that encourages developers and politicians to pursue it, but that does not mean it must be pursued or the future workers on that land will perish.

Thus, the merit of the development depends on its nature. In economics, it is assumed that markets are rational and this assumption often carries through to decisions about property -- as Locke would put it "industrious and rational." In reality, human economic decisions are often anything but rational. The notion of perfect rationality is an assumption used to derive theories, and was never intended to be used outside of that context, but today we see it often misapplied to real world circumstances. Even if there is a high degree of rationality in market decisions, it is accepted that markets are correct in the long run, meaning that not every decision conveys an optimal allocation of resources, but that decisions will in the long run, over the course of years and thousands of decisions, be close to optimal.

Thus, it may well be that development reflects "the covetousness of the quarrelsome and the contentious." In the long-run, poor decisions will fail and good decisions will succeed. When the quarrelsome and contentious expropriate lands, they will sometimes do so for selfish reasons, or with bad ideas. While the market will, in the long run, weed out those ideas, this does not make a case for property development. Indeed, it makes the case against development, because bad ideas are waste of the type of which Locke would disapprove. Because the natural land cannot be returned to its original condition in the event that the development turns out to be a bad idea, Locke would at the very least want developers to be certain that their ideas are proven and rational before undertaking the expropriation. The merits of individual project ideas are up for debate, but it is worth knowing that in many cases developers no longer have an interest in the property by the time it is proven a….....