[throwaway2048]

However, a sufficiently large mob can easily take everything Bezos has, no matter what any court says.

Property is absolutely based on consensus, property beyond anything you control with your direct person is very much one of those polite fictions society collectively agrees to, like money and laws.

If the large majority of people, for whatever reason, decided to stop agreeing, such fictions would cease to exist.

[zrm]

A thing doesn't exist by consensus just because a consensus against it could destroy it, because a consensus against pretty much anything could destroy it. What makes it exist by consensus is that a rough consensus in favor of it is required to sustain it.

This isn't true of things like property rights which could be sustained even with only minority support provided the minority had a sufficient military advantage.

It is true of DNS because consensus is inherently required to prevent it from fragmenting and ceasing to exist as a single global namespace.

[throwaway2048]

If tomorrow somehow everyone's memory got wiped so they could no longer remember say, Mt. Rushmore, It would continue to exist.

If the same thing happened with Bezos's wealth, it would cease existing, or at least the concept of him owning it would cease existing.

That's the difference. Ownership of property is entirely within people's minds.

[zrm]

If tomorrow somehow everyone's memory got wiped so they could no longer remember how to make Pad Thai then it would cease to exist as well (unless someone independently reinvents it). That doesn't mean Pad Thai exists by consensus.

If so much as one person still remembers and can prove it to everyone else, or it's documented somewhere on paper, then it would still exist. Likewise all Bezos would need is that documentation. Which is really how it works in practice. There are only a handful of people and documents concerned with exactly what someone owns. The large majority of people have no idea who owns an arbitrary piece of land or share of stock. The information comes from an authority, not a consensus.

Whereas if we're talking about the concept of property rights in general rather than specific ownership records then we're back to them being enforced by a government which it is in principle possible for them to do via superior force independent of popular support.

[klarstrup]

It's true, property exists exclusively as something someone enforces with violence directly or indirectly.