The excerpts below are all from this article: Terra Nullius
The Labor Theory of Property
In 1660, John Locke published his Two Treatises of Government, where he set out to resolve the seeming conflict between individual property rights (which he valorized) and the Bible (ditto), which set out the principle that God had created the Earth and its bounty for all of humanity. How could a Christian claim to own something personally when God had intended for everyone to share in His creation?
Locke’s answer was the “labor theory of property”: private property is the result of a human taking an unclaimed piece of the common property of humanity and mixing it with their labor (each human owns their body and thus the labor of that body), creating a property cocktail: one part unimproved nature, one part human sweat of the brow, mix well and serve in perpetuity.
'Aloha Poke'
More than a thousand years before John Locke was born, the people of the island of Kahiki coined the term “Aloha,” which is present in all the languages of the region today: it’s an untranslatable word that conveys a beautiful, complex blend of emotions and sentiments, so iconic that adherence to the “Aloha Spirit” has been Hawaiian state law since 1986.
In the 1970s (300 years after the publication of Two Treatises of Government) Hawaiian chefs expressed their aloha spirit in a dish called “poke,” a delicious mix of raw fish, served with seaweed, rice or greens, roasted and ground kukui nut meat, and other variations. In 2012, this dish spread to the mainland and mutated further, acquiring many new and delicious variants.
In 2016 (centuries after “aloha” and Locke, decades after “poke”) Zach Friedlander founded a restaurant called “Aloha Poke” in Chicago, and in the summer of 2018 Friedlander’s successor, Chris Birkinshaw, retained the law firm of Olson and Cepuritis Ltd to threaten Hawaiian chefs operating poke restaurants, insisting that they remove “aloha” from their business names. Eventually, the furor prompted Aloha Poke to issue a half-assed, self-pitying apology and to back off a little from its threats.
Friedlander defended the company’s actions and dismissed criticism as a “witch hunt” and “fake news”. [In their response] you can see the specter of John Locke haunting every word. Friedlander, his staff, and his investors put real work into making a midwestern chain of poke restaurants identified with the name “Aloha Poke.” These unimproved words had been around forever and no one else was building a national empire with them: by getting to the idea first and mixing their labor with it, they had transformed the bounty of nature into private property. This odious specter haunts much of the world today, and it has plenty of company, for this conception of property rights has sent millions to their graves.
