Quote from: JoelKatz on July 01, 2011, 03:22:14 AM

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Your right to drive your car in your driveway is not absolute.

That's because there is no such right. The right is strictly a negative right, the right not to have anyone interfere with my car or my driveway.

Yes, the right to do something is equivalent to the right not to have anyone stop you from doing it.

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My right to have my fragile glass structure remain intact is not absolute either.

Only because there is no such right at all. Imagine you have two glass structures, substantially identical. There are two people and one of them hits each of your glass structures with a hammer, intending to damage it. Assuming neither structure breaks, have they violated your property rights?

They're attempting to violate my property rights by carrying out an act that's intended to do so and has a high chance of succeeding. I've suffered no actual damages, but I think that's close enough to be considered a violation: I have the right not to be subject to serious attempts to violate my rights.

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The property right is a zone of authority. It's your property, so you say what happens to it. If someone violates this right, and you suffer damage as a result, that damage is recoverable in court. The damage could be physical damage to the property, it could be loss of use of the property, or it could be anything else so long as it's a real damage and it's fairly attributable to the action that violated that right.

Well, I have a hard time imagining a real damage you could suffer that wouldn't involve damaging, moving, or rearranging the property. But I don't think I can object to this argument unless you're going to say that loss of potential revenue counts as a "real damage".