/lit/ - Literature

>>22086079
You're confusing the issue of where property comes from originally (the mixing of labor with what already existed and was unclaimed) and property that was purchased from someone who already owned it.

In the OP, the example was a factory. If you're a rich person and you take action to bring a factory into existence (hire people to build it, set up the business, find customers, etc), that's where the rightful ownership of that factory initially comes from: the person who made it.

In the linked post, you're now talking about buying a farm, or a mine. The property is purchased from a previous owner: that's the source of the rightful ownership of the mine by the current owner. That people are hired to work the farm/mine is irrelevant as to who owns the mine.

You're also only focused on the benefits of ownership, and seemingly ignoring the liabilities. Suppose there's an accident at the factory and a third party is injured (say an I-beam goes flying through a wall and knocks over an old lady across the street). Who's liable for that? Who gets sued and brought into court? Is it the workers, or the legal owner? Of course it's the legal owner. Would you be okay with a worker-owned factory being in that situation, and all the workers having to go to court and possibly prison for negligence? My suspicion is that your reflexive thought was "no that's different because..." and you don't think the workers should be held liable in that situation, although you do think the workers are entitled to all the profits from the factory. And that's before getting into the problems of arranging maintenance, financing, marketing, distribution, arrangement of raw material delivery, etc.

You could save us both a lot of time if you'd just read Locke. It's not even that long.