The English seventeenth-century philosopher John Locke—a great influence on the Founding Fathers of the United States—puzzled over the problem of how anybody might legally come to own land. Once upon a time, nobody owned anything; land was a gift of nature or of God. But Locke’s world was full of privately owned land, whether the owner was the King himself or a simple yeoman. How had nature’s bounty become privately owned? Was that inevitably the result of a guy with a bunch of goons grabbing whatever he could? If so, all civilization was built on violent theft. That wasn’t a welcome
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