Talk:Libertarian perspectives on natural resources

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I would like to comment on the following sentence found in the above-noted Wikipedia article:

"Many classical liberals (Locke, Paine, Jefferson) recognized that absolute ownership of natural resources could deprive liberty, but avoided the issue in practice due to the great amounts of unsettled land that their societies had access to."

All three of these classical liberals did not avoid the issue in practice, but chose instead to characterize the lands on the New World as unsettled, for purposes of convenience. They did this by divesting the aboriginal inhabitants of their title through characterizing those inhabitants as not having ownership of the land, simply because they appeared to be nomadic. Since the native inhabitants did not toil on the land according to the European model of land tenure (which itself relied for its valdity on derivation from radical title vested in the monarch), the land was _Terra Nullius_, and these classical liberals were able to rationalize their taking possession. In doing this they avoided the issue of the deprivation of the liberty of the aboriginal inhabitants.