Homestead principle

The homestead principle is the principle by which one gains ownership of an unowned natural resource by performing an act of original appropriation. Appropriation could be enacted by putting an unowned resource to active use (as with using it to produce some product), joining it with previously acquired property, or by marking it as owned (as with livestock branding).

Homesteading is one of the foundations of Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism and right-libertarianism.

In Islam, a "dead" land (not previously owned or under use by the public) can be owned by "reviving" it, as per the prophetic saying: "If anyone revives dead land, it belongs to him, and the unjust root has no right."

This principle, however, does not deprive the community from some common rights in the land, including the right to pass water through it to the neighbor's land, for example.

In his 1690 work Second Treatise of Government, Enlightenment philosopher John Locke advocated the Lockean proviso which allows for homesteading. Locke saw the mixing of labour with land as the source of ownership via homesteading:

Though the earth and all inferior creatures be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself. The labour of his body and the work of his hands, we may say, are [likewise] properly his. Whatsoever, then, he removes out of the state that Nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with it, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.

Furthermore, Locke held that individuals have a right to homestead private property from nature only so long as "there is enough, and as good, left in common for others". The Lockean proviso maintains that appropriation of unowned resources is a diminution of the rights of others to it, and would only be acceptable if it does not make anyone else worse-off.

In his encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, Pope Pius XI affirmed homesteading as the source of ownership: