Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, in 20 minutes (2014) [video]

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.

> He recommends a global wealth tax and, for the United States, top income tax rates of 80 percent on income above $500,000 or $1 million to combat inequality and 50 or 60 percent on income above about $200,000 to combat inequality and grow the government.

First of all I haven't read the book yet so can't comment on the numbers.This limit can very well be a million or a few millions. He is arguing is that effective tax rate on multinational companies is lower than small and medium scale businesses. This isn't good for capitalism. In fact this will just hasten the process towards concentration of resources in the hands of few organization or groups. Will it look like a capitalist society anymore when a few big groups own everything and others compete for minimum wages?

> The violence of Law should be applied exclusively against those who violate the human rights of others. It should not be used to take property from one group to give to another.

You are circumventing the basic question. From where property came from? Did individual said "Let there be property" and property came into existence?

No, property is a result of individual's or an organized group's utilization of natural or human resources. Piketty is not arguing to take it away with force in communist fashion. All he is arguing is that tax should increase with income which is contrary to what is happening on the ground nowadays[1][2].

> I grab some clay, and create a nice figurine. You give me some sea shells in exchange for it. No one has a right to a share of my sea shells.

We are discussing taxation of higher income not some petty transaction between individual player. However, if we take your argument to its logical conclusion and imagine a billion dollar Multi-National making the same argument that I am just bartering few thousand tonnes of clay with few hundred tonnes of seashell so we aren't responsible for soil erosion and extinction of species.

Only reason not to tax large groups was that they generate employment and moves the society forward by investing money into research. This is not true research [3] as well as jobs[4].

[1] http://www.cnbc.com/2015/03/10/why-we-need-a-global-wealth-t...

[2] http://money.cnn.com/2013/03/04/news/economy/buffett-secreta...

[3] https://www.ted.com/talks/mariana_mazzucato_government_inves...

[4] http://www.truthfulpolitics.com/http:/truthfulpolitics.com/c...

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.

You can see this is action in UK right now with respect to NHS spending.

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.