Personal property is like your toothbrush or your clothes: you own and use them directly and as a general rule nobody else has a need for them unless their own is missing.
Private property is more like bottling what would otherwise be tap water or commercial farmland: everyone needs food and water to live, but private ownership of both means that only people with the required amount of money or, failing that, willingness/ability to go into debt get those essential resources.
I wish lol. I agree that it’s super impractical to use two words that are most often thought of as synonymous.
That’s probably why corporate PR people came up with “private”: to make the incurious think that it’s the same thing as personal property and thus as inviolable.
It’s pretty much perfectly in line with their general conflation of personhood and business…
Don’t confuse private property with personal property.
What is the difference?
Personal property is like your toothbrush or your clothes: you own and use them directly and as a general rule nobody else has a need for them unless their own is missing.
Private property is more like bottling what would otherwise be tap water or commercial farmland: everyone needs food and water to live, but private ownership of both means that only people with the required amount of money or, failing that, willingness/ability to go into debt get those essential resources.
Okay, that’s a nice thing to distinguish, but can we have some better words for it? This is really easy to miscommunicate.
I wish lol. I agree that it’s super impractical to use two words that are most often thought of as synonymous.
That’s probably why corporate PR people came up with “private”: to make the incurious think that it’s the same thing as personal property and thus as inviolable.
It’s pretty much perfectly in line with their general conflation of personhood and business…