The things that can be owned are not necessarily physical. Think of intellectual property, which is essentially information about the permutations into which that physical matter can be arranged, and you'll notice that there's a huge excess of potential ownership. Financial derivatives are similarly only very loosely related to the world of material, and yet they account for trillions of dollars’ worth.
Ok, so basically you're saying that one can own arbitrary bits of phase space?
But does this really give you non-conservation? Doesn't your remark just clarify that non-conservation comes from ignoring most of the space of possible ownership until someone bothers to go there?
I mean, there is clearly a difference between the value of (sensible) financial derivatives and the value of the death star to the imperial court in the Star wars universe.
So the connection to physical reality clearly matters somehow.
I'm arguing a bit more, actually: that the phase-space itself can form the basis for higher-abstraction phase-spaces, and so on almost ad infinitum, and thus provide an almost inexhaustible supply of potential ownership.
A meta-fund that owns equity in a fund that invests in securities issued by owners of multiple pop-culture IP franchises? No problem.
What is a higher-abstraction phase space? For me the natural interpretation would be something that encodes phase space in a smaller representation, but that is clearly not what you have in mind...
In any case, I don't see why positions and correlations between different particles shouldn't be considered "real", so that's arbitrary stacking of ownership brought down to earth.
In fact, wasn't subprime to a large degree about falsely claimed correlations? That is to say the derivatives implicitly assumed things that weren't true, or in other words secretly left reality behind.
