View source for Homesteadin' Is the Place for Me/Homesteading

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[[Category:Gene Callahan]]
[[Category:Homesteading]]
[[Category:John Locke]]
[[Category:Ideology Underlies Economics]]
[[Category:The Lockean Fable of Initial Acquisition]]
{{Quote
| text = But the 17th-century English landowning class had a problem. They had been busy robbing both the English peasant and the American Indian of their land. To their credit, they couldn't admit openly to themselves that they had been doing so. While the Athenians could just say to the Melians that it was natural for the powerful to dominate the weak, or the Israelites could simply claim a land as God's chosen people, these options were not open to 17th-century English Christians. They needed a good justification for their theft. And Locke's homesteading doctrine is formulated very precisely to give them one: only when a man "tills, plants, improves, cultivates" some piece of land does he actually gain ownership of it. So, there you go! Just because some English peasants had grazed a pasture for a thousand years, or some "naked savages" had hunted it for five thousand years, that land wasn't really theirs, because they hadn't done with it what a member of the landed gentry would, which was to enclose it and farm it (or at least the part not reserved for the folly and the decorative fish pond).
| cite = [[Gene Callahan]], "{{Link |Homesteadin' Is the Place for Me}}"
}}