Terminology

From AboveTheGarage

Galambos introduced his own terminology. To keep this site as accessible as possible, I generally avoid using that terminology, except where such terms align with standard usage (.e.g, "plunder").

It was Galambos' thesis that only with proper respect for property will an enduring society come into existence.

(Just because I'm offering these brief definitions does not mean I agree with them.)

• Primordial Property - A person's mind and body; a person's body becomes their own when their umbilical cord is cut. Thus, children are not property.
• Primary Property - Intellectual property; Galambos uses this term to indicate that ideas are more important than things; any idea you think up is automatically your primary property; primary property is not transferable, in terms of ownership (i.e., control), although obviously an infinite number of copies of the primary property can easily be made, and obviously a person can delegate control to another, via contractual means.
• Secondary Property - Physical property; control, and therefore ownership, over physical property can be transferred by contractual agreement. The original owner of a bit of physical property is the person that gets to it first and stakes a claim. Unfortunately, the United States can not, in VS terms, claim ownership of the Moon because the US got there by immoral means (i.e., by spending money based on plunder, i.e., taxes). So currently the Moon remains unclaimed. (The exact mechanism for staking a claim is not specified; miners who staked claims during the Gold Rush were constrained by certain rules, but it is unclear what rules would prevent someone from claiming to own the Moon just because they can see it.)
• Freedom - The condition where each person has 100% control over their property; it is considered that this is an impossible goal to fully realize, but as technology and human morality increases, the goal can be approached asymptotically.
• Government - A system (not necessarily statist) for regulating society (in the same way the governor of an engine regulates the engine). A proper system of government is moral and does not depend on plunder (see below), and all people that deign to be governed do so contractually via a subscription to government services.
• Ownership - People automatically own themselves and any ideas they generate; it is not clear how physical property is assigned to people ... the text generally assumes that this assignment occurs without conflict (but see Secondary Property above).
• Proprietary - "something that is used, produced, or marketed under exclusive legal right of the inventor or maker"; technically, the word means what it does in everyday English, namely, to have an ownership interest in something; however, some students have taken it to mean "secret", as in, "This is a proprietary conversation", based on the idea that as the creators of the conversation, they have 100% complete control over it. Exactly how this works when both people in the conversation have 100% control over it is not explained, nor is there any mechanism for recording who owns what in the conversation. In principle, every proprietary conversation would have to be recorded, so disputes as to ownership of the ideas or words expressed could be resolved.
• Contractual Disclosure - A mechanism for selling primary property (ideas) that restricts how the idea can be used. You might think of it as contractual DRM for ideas.
• Promiscuous Disclosure - Failure to keep a secret, particularly one contractually agreed upon; also, when used in conjunction with the notion of a proprietary conversation, it means to repeat a conversation without explicit permission. Since the two words are frequently used together, one gets the impression, which is incorrect, that all disclosure is promiscuous unless covered by an explicit contract. One imagines the paperwork involved in such a system would be horrendous.
• Moral behavior - any action that does not impinge on another person's property. Inaction is generally moral in the VS system - letting a person drown would be fine.
• Profit - an increase in your own happiness achieved through moral means.
• Plunder - an increase in your own happiness achieved through immoral means. Taxes, which are collected (potentially) at the point of a gun or with threat of a prison sentence, are obviously considered immoral in the VS system. (The term plunder did not originate with Galambos.)

Sadly, the more one tries to carefully formalize the meanings of these terms, the more slippery the definitons become. But it's easy to get the basic concepts in broad strokes.