Three Basic Views of Property: The Correlation of an Idea.
John Locke's ideas on general property, Karl Marx's ideas of labor and wages, and Adam Smith's ideas on the rent of property and the circumstances that balance employment seem to correlate. Even though these men lived many years ago, and years apart from each other, they seem to have similar ideas and those ideas are still in practice today.
John Locke was very passionate about his feelings toward what man's rights were, and what his needs were. These things include food, drink, and property. He believed that God had given the world to men, and gave them the world for a reason: to make use of it, for the betterment of life and convenience. Every man must have a property, that's his and only his, and one that no one can take away from him or use without his prior consent. An example of this type of property would be the product of a man's labor, the work of his body and hands. .
"When one picks apples from a tree and eats them," Locke asks, "When did they become his? When he digested them? When he ate them? Or when he picked them up and brought them home?" (Locke). Some might have said that this man had no right to the apple on the tree because he didn't have anyone's consent. But must he have the consent of all mankind to have these apples? Was it stealing because he had thought the apples didn't belong to anyone? If such a consent had needed to take these apples to eat, he would have surely starved. One cannot get the consent of all mankind; it is impossible. Removing the apple from the tree, its original state, should make it his property. He has mixed his labor and the work of his hands with the apple, and therefore the apple is his.
According to Locke, "By making an explicit consent of every commoner, necessary to any one's appropriating to himself any part of what is given in common, children or servants could not cut the meat, which their father or master had provided them in common, without assigning to every one his peculiar part" (Locke).