Rothbard bases his thinking on an ethical principle, a variety of ‘natural law’ or ‘natural rights’, inherited from Locke. Locke’s theory of property basically held that it was permissible to appropriate unused land if you used it. This is, ironically, an obvious modern precursor to the LTV, which Rothbard professes to absolutely despise, to the point of writing a scurrilous attack on Adam Smith to accuse him of plagiarism. Locke did not, of course, think that what native peoples did with their land constituted ‘use.’ Nor did he mean that the people who actually worked the land owned it; he
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