Quote from: Ben on January 07, 2013, 01:58 amQuote from: SelfSovereignty on January 06, 2013, 01:51 pm... what *are* you talking about? I own my car. I paid for it in full. I pay nothing to anyone except the insurance company, gas companies, and repair shop. I'm sorry, but either you don't live in America, or you're defining "intrinsic value," differently than I do.Lets just zap you over to another jurisdiction, such as Holland (or most other european jurisdictions):Owning a car means you are required to pay road taxes for that car. If you do not pay these taxes, government will seize your property to sell it at auction until the required amount of taxes are paid. If they cannot be paid, they will impound the vehicle. This is, in the end and after legal process, enforced by police that are allowed to use violence against you to get the governments wishes fulfilled. Lets say you got a car worth $10.000, and road tax (based on its weight) is $60 a month (a common scenario here). This taxation reduces the $10.000 car to an object worth $10.000 with a $720 annual tax burden. If you keep that car around for 10 years, you'll pay $7200 in taxes on it, while it also deteriorates in value over that time. But even if it required no fuel, no maintenance, and its value would not decline, that car would be a tax burden larger than its value over the course of 15 years or so. Over that time frame it would be a negative value asset (i.e. a debt) if you just own it and not even use it. The only way to avoid the tax is to remove the car from the vehicle registry, which means you cannot drive it on any public road, rendering it worthless since it has no practical use anymore. Some car collectors with a large piece of private land opt for this, but it's not practical as you cannot even drive it to a supermarket unless that happens to be on a plot adjacent to your land with a road between them present. After skimming some of these posts again, I'll admit that I totally forgot about vehicle registration. But that doesn't really result in anyone taking away my property, it just means I can't legally use the car anymore.The whole intrinsic worth thing isn't what I was objecting to, by the way. It was the statement about property being confiscated. I don't really have an opinion on intrinsic worth of objects; I never really pondered it much. I lean toward disagreeing with laws establishing it, but that's just me being honest -- I'm not saying I'm right and that I should be agreed with.