>How do you determine it's my laptop? How do you determine I didn't give consent?

How do we determine that you assaulted me? It's your word against mine. We're not talking about the complexity of determining the true account of events, which is obviously great. We're talking about the complexity of establishing what property rights are. It's not complicated at all.

>What about if I wrote a contract to lend you my laptop and we didn't specify a certain edge case?

Then common law, which springs from the first principles of personal and property rights, would preside.

We'd have a similarly difficult time determining if a hockey fight classifies as assault. Or if in a traffic altercation, you stepping out of your car and aggressively approaching me justified my preemptive (or aggressive?) first punch.

>There are answers to all these questions, but we need a complicated system of laws to determine them.

The system of laws being complicated does not mean that it is not generally straightforward to determine what a person has property rights to. The complexity comes from the edge cases, but most cases are not edge cases.

>We're talking about the complexity of establishing what property rights are. It's not complicated at all.

Okay so what are they? What makes your claim to own the things you own correct and someone else's invalid?

Or more generally, how do you go from a world with no property rights, to one where everything has a defined owner, in a way that is simple and obviously fair?

Again, there are answers to these questions, but they are complicated and even within libertarian thought, people disagree about them.

>What makes your claim to own the things you own correct and someone else's invalid?

The fact that I made it, or acquired it from someone else through trade.

>Or more generally, how do you go from a world with no property rights, to one where everything has a defined owner, in a way that is simple and obviously fair?

The homestead principle is based on the notion that if something is unclaimed, and someone adds value to it, they should be able to enjoy the full benefit of that value-added thing.

The only 'artificial' private property is scarce natural resources, most importantly land, and that is because much if not most of its value comes from its natural form, rather than anything added to it by its original homesteader, and it is this class of property which society has a moral right to create rules/taxes on.

With respect to this latter class of property, once the rules on its use have been established (say a rule asserting that a property title owner must pay a rent equal to 1% of the value of their land to the government each year) anything the title owner earns in accordance with the rules (e.g. anything they earn on top of the 1% tax) is theirs by right.

And sure, these are reasonable answers, but they're starting to show complexity, and people aren't necessarily going to agree that they're obviously fair.

Society is complex, and trying to explain a principle and its application in all possible permutations will require an indepth explanation, but the overall concept is coherent and straightforward. I wouldn't call it ambiguous.

Regarding people disagreeing: people also didn't agree that ending ritual sacrifice and slavery were fair, but I don't believe many reasonable people would disagree on the general outlines of what private property is if the discussion is permitted to progress far enough.

I believe counter-notions are mostly a result of demagoguery and would dissipate in the face of reasoned inquiry.

Well for what it's worth, I think property is an effective economic system which should be utilised to the extent that it leads to good outcomes. I think arguing about a philosophical notion of property rights is ultimately pointless if a system that enforces them doesn't lead to better outcomes than one that flagrantly violates them.

I guess we can agree to disagree on that. I think if we step out of the philosophical, it's clear what private property rights are at the level of principle. True, there is a lot of disagreement in relation to specific cases, but I think that's due to superficial understandings people have about these cases, and that once the complexities of the given situation are elucidated, there would mostly be agreement on what a person has private property rights to.

As for outcomes, knowing what we know about incentives and how they affect the behavior of economic agents, and extrapolating the effect of the evolutionary processes of the market, it's inconceivable to me that violating private property rights would result in better outcomes in relation to increasing economic output over the long-run, than protecting them.

My impression is that completely unhindered property rights lead to ever amplifying inequality, as those who own capital are more able to earn money than those who do not.

I think a Capitalist system needs to be paired with a wealth redistribution mechanism to damp that amplification, such that inequality can only ever be maintained by constant effort.

EDIT: And while you may be right, I think being unable to conceive of ways in which you may be wrong speaks poorly of your imagination.

I don't believe that inequality justifies violence to force people to give up the currency they receive in private trade (to pay an income tax).

I also don't believe that inequality is a natural outcome of a market economy. The market will favor efficiency above all things, because it is an iterative process that rewards good utilizers/investors of capital with greater allocations of capital, and it is not efficient for 5 people to own and direct as much capital as 150 million people. More individual owners of capital means much more attention being given in the management of each unit of capital, resulting in higher returns on it.

The sources of income inequality need to be found in the government either not fulfilling its responsibility to manage the commons in the interest of the public, or in authoritarian prohibitions that disproportionately harm the less wealthy and the poor.

Free-market inhibiting factors that could be contributing to income disparity:

* high fixed-costs for participating in business. Fixed costs, unlike variable costs, punish small businesses. Regulations are known in the economics field as a source of fixed costs. A very basic example: you can't offer stock in your company on a stock exchange without having millions of dollars to pay lawyers. This excludes millions of small businesses from one of the best sources of capital: the public stock market. More on regulations causing an upward distribution of income: Working Paper: The Upward Redistribution of Income: Are Rents the Story?: http://cepr.net/publications/reports/working-paper-the-upwar...

* high market transaction costs as a result of regulations and taxes. Why do high market transaction costs contribute to income disparity? Because non-market transactions internal to an organization are not subject to the costs imposed by regulations and taxes. This will result in large corporations having a competitive advantage over small ones that rely on market transactions for a greater portion of their activity. For example, a large corporation doesn't need to pay a sales tax to have its accounting department do an accounting job for it. A small corporation that pays an external company to do it does.