ZadekpediaJohn Locke is invoked across The Bob Zadek Show as a foundational figure for private property, natural rights, and the limits of state power. Guests and the host treat him less as a subject of historical dispute than as a shared authority whose ideas underwrite libertarian arguments about ownership, law, and economic liberty.
Property and the non-aggression principle
In an episode on civil forfeiture, Bob Zadek contrasted the left’s supposed disregard for private property with the regard shown by John Locke and the founders, arguing that a civil law system respecting private property is the foundation of every sensible economic system Cops Are No Better Than Criminals (2011). The same episode’s discussion of perverse incentives in law enforcement turned on the idea that police and prosecutors should not benefit directly from the laws they enforce.
Walter Block, asked to summarize libertarianism, described it as a narrow philosophical perspective concerned only with what just law should be, and identified the non-aggression principle as one half of the concept: keeping one’s “mitts” off other people and their property absent permission How the Free Market Will Save the Planet (2014). Block named Locke and Murray Rothbard as the sources of his theory of property rights, which holds that one owns oneself, any part of nature one homesteads or mixes one’s labor with, and anything else acquired through voluntary means such as buying, selling, gifts, or gambling. He illustrated the point with cleared land and domesticated cows, traded so that each party ends up owning what the other produced, with ownership traceable back to voluntary action and homesteading of initial resources.
Zadek framed homesteading as a concept assuming virgin land owned by nobody, in which adding labor to unowned land or property creates ownership by virtue of added value. He noted that homesteading rarely occurs now because land is mostly accounted for, though Block corrected him by 1 percent, citing virgin land on mountains in Wyoming or Alaska and the moon, Mars, and the oceans as remaining unowned. Zadek summarized the resulting system as property acquired or divested through uncoerced cooperation among consenting adults.
Executive discretion and the Second Treatise
Frank H. Buckley traced the idea of executive discretion back to the twelfth-century “royal prerogative,” which Zadek characterized as being in favor of the king Has America Become an “Elective Monarchy”? (2014). Buckley said the Framers hated the royal prerogative but that the executive must be given some slack, and called the best argument for this John Locke’s Second Treatise, which holds that laws will be passed that with hindsight should not be enforced. Buckley cited same-sex marriage litigation and the Obamacare website rollout as instances where presidential discretion made sense, and argued the practice had been taken to a further level with immigration, after Congress refused to pass the DREAM Act.
The fruits of one’s labor and North Carolina
Jessica Thompson, discussing litigation over a food truck ordinance, connected the phrase “entitled to the fruits of one’s labors” to John Locke’s Enlightenment writings on property Food Truck v. Farmville (2022). She stated that Locke was the author of the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina in 1669, when Carolina was still a colony, and described North Carolina as having a classical liberal tradition tying it to the Enlightenment through Locke. She noted a state think tank named in his honor, the John Locke Foundation, committed to free market principles.
Thompson explained that the claim in the food truck case was brought under the North Carolina Constitution rather than the federal one because the Supreme Court had watered down federal protections for economic liberty since the New Deal, and state constitutions can provide protections beyond the federal floor. She said North Carolina’s constitution explicitly protects the right to earn the fruit of one’s labor, and that other state supreme courts have interpreted due process and law of the land clauses to protect a right to earn an honest living. She described waves of litigation under the clause, decreasing around the 1980s, with earlier rigorous enforcement in equal protection contexts and cases striking down laws as arbitrary interference, including opinions on massage ordinances that exempted the YMCA and barbershops, and cases involving photography and dry cleaners.
Across episodes
Locke recurs in four episodes spanning 2011 to 2022, but the episodes show no development or argument between treatments: he is cited in each as an authority for a different application — property and forfeiture, homesteading theory, executive prerogative, and the North Carolina constitution — rather than as a figure whose interpretation changes.