Locke: The Problem of Hoarding Goods

"And thus came in the use of money, some lasting thing that men might keep without spoiling, and that by mutual consent men would take in exchange for the truly useful, but perishable supports of life." (Section 47)

John Locke, A second Treatise on Government. Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis and Cambridge 1980. (Gutenberg txt). Image: P.D. White. http://www.pdwhite.com/dragons-hoard.html

In order to sanction the right to private property which is so essential in Locke's theory, he had to prove why it was such an attractive idea. He did so by stating that private property is more lucrative than common or shared property. A field, he said, will yield to one person about as much as this person will invest. If many people cultivate a field with the goal to get only as much grain as they can consume themselves, the field will produce very little. However, if one person works the field intensively, and invests all his time and energy in it, the produce is increased tenfold, if not a hundred or even a thousandfold. The surplus, of course, was to be shared by everyone, after all it is against the natural law to hoard perishable resources, and waste them. 

Having proved that private property was indeed more lucrative, Locke had yet to evince how it was worth someone's precious time and energy. After all, there was always the risk that one industrious person would work himself to death, all the while feeding a bunch of opportunists: people who only needed to sit by and wait while the harvest threatened to rot. The invention of money, whereby gold, which is naturally scarce and therefore valuable was substituted for perishable goods, was a convenient solution in order to prevent such a situation. Money, to Locke, is the motor behind industriousness. It allowed hardworking people to get every penny's worth of their time in the field. Since money kept forever, and because it was not a commodity that people needed in order to live, breathe or be healthy it was exempt from the restrictions against hoarding, condoning the unlimited, unconscionable accumulation of it. Ironically, though, the problem Locke first set out to solve was the problem of the unlimited, unconscionable accumulation of power. 

Instead of denying the problem of the unlimited accumulation of goods, Locke faced it head-on and decided that it didn't have to be detrimental to his theory. The desire to amass property doesn't have to be problematic if it doesn't harm anybody physically by creating scarcity. His solution, therefore was, once again not political -it preceded the instigation of a legal authority- but economical. If everyone were to keep working in their fields, their orchards, their workshops resources would become so plentiful that no one would ever have to be hungry again. To many modern readers this will sound like an oversimplified, if not blatantly naive portrayal of productivity. Time has taught us that there is no inexhaustible resource, and concerning what little there is, increased labour will not always yield bigger produce.