The philosopher John Locke gave an account of how it could be just for a person to appropriate land as personal property, when the land previously was open to the common use of everyone. He said that this could be justly done if the appropriator had mixed their labor with the land, say by farming it, so long as there remained an equal amount and quality of land for others to likewise appropriate (Locke [1689] 1963, II sect. 33 p. 333). Many, including Robert Nozick, Matt Zwolinski, and me, find this a plausible account. The problem is how to satisfy what Nozick called “the Lockean proviso” (Nozick 1974, 178-182) that there be an equal amount and quality of land for others to likewise appropriate. Usually the best land will be acquired first, and what remains will be of lower quality. (For example, by the time the German Mennonites came to the U.S. from Russia, the only land left open for them to homestead (mix their labor with) was the prairie of Oklahoma that already was barren and was soon to turn into an unfarmable dust bowl (Egan 2006, 62-72).) So a conscientious political philosopher would seek to preserve the spirit of the Lockean proviso by saying that it could be met if the worst off had some other way, besides mixing their labor with good enough land, that would allow them to support their family and find a path to a better future. Zwolinski (2015) argues that the best other way to satisfy the Lockean proviso is by instituting Universal Basic Income (UBI). I argue that the best other way is for the worst off to have good enough job opportunities, what I call a “redundant labor market,” or else to have good enough free-agent entrepreneurship opportunities.
The books referenced above are:
Egan, Timothy. 2006. The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Locke, John. [1689] 1963. Two Treatises of Government. 2nd ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Nozick, Robert. 1974. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books, Inc.
Zwolinski, Matt. 2015. Property Rights, Coercion, and the Welfare State: The Libertarian Case for a Basic Income for All. The Independent Review 19, no. 4 (Spring): 515–29.