Umm, Locke was talking about how a moral man chooses to give Charity to those less fortunate, he was not talking about Government redistributing tax money or any money extorted by the threat of force from the prosperous, you highlighted the wrong sections of that passage.
Charity has been redefined lately as giving a portion unto Caesar for him to do good works with. It used to mean that after you took care of You and Yours, you gave someone less fortunate a hand up to show grace and a desire to choose to be generous.
look at this first line
But we know God hath not left one Man so to the Mercy of another, that he may starve him if he please: God the Lord and Father of all, has given no one of his Children such a Property
Now if God is God, and thus the almighty creator, his edicts are to be obeyed, without question.
so when Locke is writing of the weaker brother entitled to the surpluses of his neighbor, that means that. the crack smoking junkie living on the end of your street, if he is starving, would be ENTITLED to come into your house and take YOUR surplusses to sustain himself. that's exactly what that means. in that sense is property truly yours in that case? no then it belongs to everyone in your community.
Which is exactly why I don't take Locke's ideas as gospel, he outright said you are obligated to provide. an obligation is not charity in the sense that it is not a voluntary donation. The crack dealer down the road has
a Title to so much out of another's Plenty, as will keep him from extream want, where he has no means to subsist otherwise Title means he owns it and is obligated to its use. hardly the same as charity.
If we want to talk enlightment philosophy in regards to property we'll also need to discuss The works of the many socialists souch as Pierre Proudhon who's slogan was "property is theft" (which I certainly do not agree with, but his writings are equally valid with Locke's) or Malthus's economic theory which was part in parcel with the Mercantile theory of economics.
The point being, putting the word "divine" or "natural" in your works doesn't make it so. if rights were truly divinely given everyone in the world would be entitled to irrevocable rights by nature of existing. If rights were Divine and God was the source of such rights then despots would be struck down for defying god's edicts. if rights were natural no one would think of denying them to anyone.
so we have a wonderful story in philosophy, but in reality what we have is rights are constitutional, they're granted by social contract, and one that's not hard to modify at that. look up what happened to the japanese in WW2, american citizens who just happened to have parents from the wrong country, where was their right to an attorney? or right to a trial? or yada yada, the only right there were given was "Right this way" at bayonet point. there's your god-given rights right there.
So instead of making pointless arguments using philosophers who've been dead for centuries, it's time to have the real discussion over where our "rights" stand today then work to defend that baseline, becuase God or "Nature" is not going to stand up for your rights. We've had far too many real rights lost while people have been yapping over stuff like public schools, people are going to read people like SVG who blames the existence of public schools on kids getting shot at school and right away they'll tune out anything else he says and allow our "rights" to be taken away because they'll associate rights with people who blame the cold blooded murder of scores of children on the existence of schools.
