John Locke is invoked across The Bob Zadek Show as a philosophical authority for the show’s libertarian account of property, labor and limited government. The excerpts do not present a biography or a sustained treatment of his writings; instead, Locke appears as a name that host and guests reach for when grounding arguments about private property, the right to earn a living, and the limits of executive power.
Property, labor and the founders
In the episode on civil asset forfeiture, Bob Zadek frames respect for private property as the dividing line between his own view and that of “folks on the left,” saying they “just do not seem to respect the importance of private property in the way that John Locke and the founders of our country did.” In the same passage he argues that most third-world countries understand that the first step toward entering the second or first world is to build a civil law system that respects private property, which he calls the foundation on which every sensible economic system is based Cops Are No Better Than Criminals (2011).
Locke recurs in the discussion of the non-aggression principle with Walter Block. Block describes the theory of property rights he adheres to, “following John Locke and Murray Rothbard,” as holding that a person owns himself, owns any part of nature or natural resources he homesteads or mixes his labor with, and owns anything else acquired through voluntary means such as buying and selling, gifts and gambling. Block illustrates the point with cleared land and corn traded for domesticated cows and their milk, tracing ownership back to voluntary action and the homesteading of initial resources How the Free Market Will Save the Planet (2014).
In that same conversation, Zadek restates the homesteading idea as assuming virgin land not owned by anybody, where adding labor to land that belongs to no one else acquires ownership by dint of having added value through one’s own labor. Block responds that Zadek is “only 99% correct,” noting that some virgin land remains at the top of mountains in Wyoming or Alaska, and certainly the moon and Mars and the oceans How the Free Market Will Save the Planet (2014).
Executive discretion and the Second Treatise
Frank H. Buckley, discussing the royal prerogative and executive discretion, calls John Locke’s Second Treatise the best argument he knows for giving the executive some slack. Buckley attributes to Locke the point that laws will be passed which, with the benefit of hindsight, just should not be enforced, and he notes that in America laws are also passed which are unconstitutional and which one would not want the president to enforce. Buckley offers same-sex marriage as an example, saying the president went off on a bit of a limb in instructing the Department of Justice not to pursue litigation opposing same-sex marriage and that the Supreme Court backed him up Has America Become an “Elective Monarchy”? (2014).
Locke in the American founding and in North Carolina
Locke is named among the influences on John Allison’s The Leadership Crisis and the Free Market Cure. In his introduction, Zadek says it is fair to say the book assimilates the collective wisdom of Aristotle, John Locke, Thomas Jefferson and Ayn Rand John Allison on the Leadership Crisis and the Free Market Cure (2015).
The episode with C. Bradley Thompson on America’s Revolutionary Mind lists John Locke among its topics, alongside the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, natural rights, limited government, progressivism and Woodrow Wilson. The excerpt for that episode consists only of a summary and topic list, with no attributed discussion of Locke by either speaker C. Bradley Thompson on America’s Revolutionary Mind (2019).
Locke figures most concretely in the food truck litigation episode. Jessica Thompson, discussing the North Carolina Constitution’s protection of the right to earn the fruits of one’s labor, says the idea of the right to the fruits of one’s own labor is throughout John Locke’s works and the importance of property and the like. She states that Locke was actually the author of one of North Carolina’s first constitutions, the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, in 1669, when Carolina was still a colony. She also notes that a North Carolina state think tank, the John Locke Foundation, is named in his honor and is committed to free market principles. Thompson describes North Carolina as having a rich classical liberal tradition connecting it to the Enlightenment through Locke and the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina Food Truck v. Farmville (2022).
In the same episode, Zadek asks whether there has been much litigation in North Carolina where litigants depended on the “fruits of their labors” phrase, and whether citations to it are many, few or occasional. Thompson answers that it has come in waves and decreased a bit around the 1980s, but that before that there was rigorous enforcement under the fruits of their own labor clause, both in equal protection cases and in striking down laws as arbitrary interference with the fruits of their own labor. She cites opinions addressing attempts to ban massages from masseuses of the opposite sex, where courts noted that massages were also given at the YMCA and at barbershops, and says courts have done the same with photography and dry cleaners Food Truck v. Farmville (2022).
Across episodes
Locke is invoked in more than one episode, but the excerpts do not show a question about him being argued and then revisited. The 2011 episode uses him as an authority for private property against civil forfeiture; the 2014 Block episode uses him for the homesteading theory of property; the 2014 Buckley episode cites the Second Treatise on executive discretion; the 2015 introduction lists him among the influences on a guest’s book; the 2019 episode names him only in a topic list; and the 2022 episode ties him to the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina and the state constitution’s labor clause. What changes across the excerpts is the application, not the treatment of Locke himself, and no guest or host advances a developed interpretation of his work that a later episode takes up.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts contain no account of Locke’s life, his other writings, or the historical circumstances in which he wrote. They do not state what the Second Treatise argues beyond Buckley’s single attributed point about unenforced laws, nor what the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina provided beyond Thompson’s description of Locke as its author in 1669. No speaker in these excerpts disputes Locke’s authority or offers a critical reading of him. The excerpts also do not establish how the show’s various guests would connect their separate uses of Locke to one another.