My small contribution to science. Combined with my goofy contribution to copyright licenses.
**Private property** is a resource that is exclusively controlled by an economic actor. This actor could be a consensus system of a group of people, an android, or a single human. What matters is that the actor is a rational actor that pursues ends according to a prioritized value scale and manipulates its environment to exchange or transform resources in its universe in accordance with these ends. The corallary of possessing exclusive control of the resource is the private posession of information, in the context of the universe and the information in it, sufficient to exclusively control the resource in the respect in which the resource is owned.
For example, a Bitcoin UTXO is owned in, among other respects, the respect of dispensing any portion of bitcoin up to its nominal value into the possession denoted by any public key or public key hash, provided a sufficient fee is deducted from the total value and passed out of ownership. This exclusive control exists exactly because the private key for the address and the knowledge of how to use it—the information required for control—is possessed exclusively by the owner of the UTXO, in the context of a universe with a functioning Bitcoin network.
Information may be dispersed, localized, distributed, marked on a ledger, intrinsic to the state of the matter within spacetime in the universe, denoted in the owner's mind, denoted in multiple people's minds, what have you. The operative principle is that it is information in a configuration necessary to control the property and that this control (and thereby part of the information) is exclusively possessed by the owner.
This definition also implies that for all conflicts between actors over the control of the resource in the respect in which the owner does control it, the conflict is resolved in favor of the original owner, as this is the only way that the control is exclusively attributable to the owner. In the event a conflict is resolved in favor of a latecomer, the property ceases to be the private property of the owner. Voluntarily relinquishing exclusive control also releases the resource into nature or into another actor's control and thereby terminates private ownership by the original owner.
Ethics can best be considered and analyzed starting from this positive account of private property. As a preview of such a discussion, Natural Law would imply some restrictions on the ethical use of private property, such as one ought not control resources in such a way as to violate the physical integrity of another's property or to violate informed consent.
My #definitions
#economics
#austrianeconomics
#humanaction
#praxeology
#privateproperty
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ABSOLUTE DICK LICENSE, version 0.00:
©Kevin's Bacon 2025 under the terms of the ABSOLUTE DICK LICENSE
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Discussion
nostr:nprofile1qqsyx708d0a8d2qt3ku75avjz8vshvlx0v3q97ygpnz0tllzqegxrtgpr9mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuumwdae8gtnnda3kjctv9usy2c9y and nostr:nprofile1qqsw4v882mfjhq9u63j08kzyhqzqxqc8tgf740p4nxnk9jdv02u37ncpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9uju6mpd4czuumfw3jsz9nhwden5te0wfjkccte9ec8y6tdv9kzumn9wsq3yamnwvaz7tmsw4e8qmr9wpskwtn9wvql3tqm , I'm curious what you guys think.
I'm planning to publish this to the Mises Wire and I'm wondering what professional economists think of my ideas as an amateur haha! Pay no mind to the very plain and dry license text at the end 😆