The property-owners of the modern world are not the legitimate heirs of Lockean individuals who performed quasi-Lockean (‘quasi’ to allow for Nozick’s emendations of Locke) acts of original acquisition; they are the inheritors of those who, for example, stole, and used violence to steal the common lands of England from the common people, vast tracts of North America from the American Indian, much of Ireland from the Irish, and Prussia from the original non-German Prussians. This is the historical reality ideologically concealed behind any Lockean thesis. The lack of any principle of
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