 Arguments of this sort are familiar and important, but like all consequentialist arguments, they need to be treated with caution. In most private property systems, there are some individuals who own little or nothing, and who are entirely at the mercy of others. So when it is said that ‘people in general’ are better off under private property arrangements, we have to ask ‘Which people? Everyone? The majority? Or just a small class of owners whose prosperity is so great as to offset the consequent immiseration of the others in an aggregative utilitarian calculus?’ (Wenar 1998). John Locke hazarded the suggestion that everyone would be better off.  Comparing England, whose commons were swiftly being enclosed by private owners, to pre-colonial America, where the natives continued to enjoy universal common access to land, Locke speculated that ‘a King of a large and fruitful Territory there [i.e. in America] feeds, lodges, and is clad worse than a day Labourer in England.’ (Locke 1988 [1689], II, para. 41) The laborer may not own anything, but his standard of living is higher on account of the employment prospects that are offered in a prosperous privatized economy. Alternatively, the more optimistic of the consequentialists cast their justifications in the language of what we would now call ‘Pareto-improvement’. Maybe the privatization of previously common land does not benefit everybody: but it benefits some and it leaves others no worse off than they were before. The homelessness and immiseration of the poor, on this account, is not a result of private property; it is simply the natural predicament of mankind from which a few energetic appropriators have managed to extricate themselves.