 The best known are Lockean stories (Locke 1988 [1689] and Nozick 1974). One begins with a description of a state of nature and an initial premise about land belonging to nobody in particular. And then one tells a story about why it would be sensible for individuals to appropriate land and other resources for their personal use and about the conditions under which such appropriations would be justified. Individuals have needs and they find themselves surrounded with objects capable of satisfying those needs. But each person, X, is vaguely aware that the objects have not been furnished by God or nature for X’s use alone; others have a need for them as well. So what is X to do? One thing is clear: if X has to wait for some general meeting of everyone who might be affected by his use of the resources in his vicinity before he is allowed to use them then, as Locke put it, ‘man had starved, notwithstanding the plenty God had given him’ (Locke 1988 [1689], II, para. 28). So the individual goes ahead and takes what he needs (ibid., I, para. 86). He ‘mixes his labor’ with the object he needs, and by doing so he fulfills his fundamental duty of self-preservation, while also increasing the value of the resources he works on for the indirect benefit of others. The first phase of Locke’s story involves individuals satisfying their needs out of the common largesse in this virtuous and self-reliant way. The second phase of the story involves their exchanging surplus goods that they have appropriated with one another; rather than saying that such surpluses lapse back into the common heritage, Locke allows individuals to acquire, grow, or make more than they can use so that markets become possible and prosperity general (ibid., II, paras. 46–51). With markets and prosperity, however, comes inequality, avarice and envy, and the third and last stage of Locke’s account is the institution of government to protect the property rights that have grown up in this way (ibid., II, paras. 123 ff.) The story assumes that individuals are able to reason through these issues of who is entitled to appropriate and use and exchange goods without the tutelage of government, and that at neither the first stage nor the second stage is any social or political decision-making about property required.