Dust,
What you seem to be saying that only physical property counts and that intellectual property cannot possibly be considered to exist or to have value. What you are not taking into account is the fact you earned the wealth to trade for the car by using the intellectual property you have acquired. A lot of it was acquired without paying out cash and a lot more required cash payment to acquire. So in a very real sense, your car is as much intellectual property as is a song, a poem, or a method and design of presenting action choices on a computer display.
Now if everyone could take everyone else's intellectual property for free without consequence, why would anyone work for decades to invent, design, implement, and provide a product using the intellectual property resulting from that very costly effort. Why then should you even have to pay for a car? Why not just take it? After all, it was created with "free" intellectual property and so should itself be free.
Oh, you say that the car took physical labor to create and that one should pay for another's physical labor. However, at the same time you are saying, in effect, the intellectual labor required to create intellectual property is irrelevant and that labor need not be paid for. This is at the very least an inconsistent hypocrisy. However, without intellectual property behind and directing the physical labor, the physical labor produces nothing let alone a car.
Yes, the nature of intellectual property and the assignment of ownership and value is a subtle and non-obvious complex thing. The building of a car is also a non obvious and complex thing or there would have been cars 20,000 years ago in the stone age. Hence we have established copyrights and patents to define intellectual property for exactly the same reason we established deeds for real estate, pink slips for cars, and bills of sale for more common less costly property.
The subtlety and non obviousness of intellectual property can often result in disputes. Rather than going to war, we simply take the dispute to court and let a usually non emotional objective process sort out the details and to define a resolution to the dispute. Is not this a much better resolution than guns, bullets, and bombs being used to settle disputes?
