Unless you can show me a "property right" under a scanning-tunneling microscope, I submit to you that they're an arbitrarily-defined concept. And as such, it's not "sophistry" to assume one definition of the concept, and proceed from it in a series of logical steps. In this case, the assumption is that the law creates the property right, and the law can take it away, under certain conditions. That's the "forfeiture" part.
"Corruption" refers to when a public entity doesn't follow its own rules. Following a self-consistent set of rules, the premises of which you reject, is not corruption.
Your argument essentially boils down to "words in power mean what people in power say they mean". The entire point of law is to create distributed consensus. By morphing definitions away from their plain meanings, that entire basis of law is undermined.
Which is exactly what is happening here. In a just society, one is comforted by the belief that if they're stolen from, then the institutions of society will act against (or at least condemn) the perpetrator. In the modern US, the uniformed gangs act with little concern, and then legions of legal "scholars" compose reams of justification for how what occurred was "legitimate".
Either the justice system needs to be reformed and the uniformed thugs sent to jail, or the social contract continues to degrade and we end up with revolution and collapse.
> Your argument essentially boils down to "words in power mean what people in power say they mean". Your argument essentially boils down to "words in power mean what people in power say they mean". The entire point of law is to create distributed consensus.
No, the point of law is to provide notice of the way the ruler intends to apply power. (Which is, of course, also undermined by lack of clarity in meaning of the law, but in a different way.)
Distributed consensus is the point of democratic government, which is a newer thing than law.
Unlikely. When the contractual change is sufficiently tolerable, society adapts and the idea of property rights morphs along with it. That's less expensive and demeaning than revolutions and collapse. It's an advantage compared to god's law, which is rather a bit harder to change than man's law.
When god's law changes, it classically means war, killing all the males above a certain age, marrying the women and girls off while changing their language and religion - i.e. cultural, and hence deity, decimation. So yeah, watch out for that one.
"Corruption" refers to when a public entity doesn't follow its own rules. Following a self-consistent set of rules, the premises of which you reject, is not corruption.