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Money can only be hoarded because it has no real use; it will not feed or cloth someone who is starving or cold. This implies that things like food and clothing, which have obvious and immediate intrinsic values, cannot be rightfully hoarded in most societies because this will cause injury to someone else.
This places a severe limit on the power of money in Locke's construct; though it is deemed acceptable to hoard any amount of gold and silver, and though this gold and silver can be used to purchase things of real value like land and other property, it is not acceptable to maintain control of vast amounts of this property at the expense of others. A lord may own the land, therefore, but only because men have agreed on the value of the money that the land was purchased with, and only as long as the landowner continues to let others use the land to maintain a livelihood for themselves and their families.
Other passages in the Second Treatise of Government support this interpretation of Locke's meaning. Even the closing statement of the first chapter, which outlines the various rights of governments as Locke sees them -- including "the regulating and preserving of property" -- claims that all government actions must be undertaken "only for the public good."
As the government mandate to rule derived from public consent, it must be assumed that the definition of the public good must also be derived from that same public, and thus Locke's conclusion that men have consented to an unequal distribution of land and property is self-evident. This does not mean that men may not attempt to create more equality through established means -- earning money and buying their own land, for example -- and in no way should the passage in section fifty of the treatise be interpreted as making the protection of private property against...
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