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It sounds like a typical get rich quick come-on doesn’t it. After all, who doesn’t want oodles of loot in return for diddly squat? But it actually is possible and in many ways beats the crap out of working for money in any traditional sense.

But enough of the teasing, show us the fucking money! That’s what you’re thinking isn’t it? Well let’s take a few blindingly obvious examples where people regularly receive often eye-wateringly huge sums of spondulicks for “doing” precisely nothing.

Interest on investments is pretty common, as is owning a business where other folk do the hard graft while the owner is entitled to the profits, dividends, bonuses and whatever else they feel like skimming off on account of, well, owning the goddam joint.

Fame, beauty and having once achieved something noteworthy at some point in the past are also good for opening your own private sluice gates to a veritable lake of liquidity.

Owning the rights to something that other people value and wish they owned – there’s another one – and it doesn’t even have to be something especially tangible.

A piece of paper declaring that you own an area of land, for example, bestows the rights to charge others to cross it, dig in it, build on it, take pictures of it even.

Right is Might

It’s complete bollocks of course; the birds shit on your “rights” and indeed your land, but other humans are obliged to abide by the bullshit, which means that so far as money (which is an entirely human abstraction) is concerned, ownership is a valuable commodity unto itself. Why?

Because observing conventions such as property ownership is how society is glued together and if we don’t all play the game then chaos ensues.

You can own all manner of interesting rights – the text in a book, a photograph you took, the subject of a photograph that someone else took, a sound recording, some gadget or process you (or one of your hapless employees) invented, a website even…

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