Topic: What to do about people who believe that stealing is ok - page 3. (Read 1117 times)

We need a system where all workers are financially independent. There are two parts to my argument.  
1. Workers should not be poor. This is not saying that workers should be rich but just that they should have an acceptable bare minimum.  

2. People should not be born into poverty.  Of course I am absolving a child who is not properly fed of any personal responsibility for their financial situation.  What kind of monster would blame children for being born poor.  Of course there is a certain age, where children are no longer children and should have developed their own sense of responsibility but that is all depending on proper conditions for their cognitive development.

A child who experiences severe trauma throughout childhood will have their executive functioning abilities hindered.  It shouldn't be hard to understand that irresponsible behavior is more a symptom of poverty than a cause of it.  

Being born with access to basic necessities like food, shelter, health, and education is not "the other side".  I've only ever lived with these things because I was born into it.   The grass is greener on my side and I want to include everyone else.

No one has preached to live in the Soviet system.  Just because I am condemning capitalism does not mean I am endorsing the Soviet system.  Both are bad enough that its not even worth arguing which is better.   No one has lived in communism nor is that being suggested here.  Yet another soft strawman.  Social democracy like that in Northern Europe is a much better first step than totalitarian government though. I've preached everyone having opportunity and fairness in the work place.  Thats not communism.  The social democracies of Northern Europe still have a long way to go but at least they have achieved a level of dignity I consider acceptable.

UBI would also be a great first step.  Welfare and UBI don't solve all problems of capitalism but are essentially bandaids that provide dignity to the poor living in a system that is designed to crush them.  The rare exception of special people who can overcome poverty is anecdotal and in no way represents the general nature of the system. 

Those in the lower class do not have to stay in the lower class. People can shift between various statuses of wealth.

Cast a stone towards the redistribution of wealth only if you expect to be constantly poor... otherwise, it wouldn't benefit you at all.

All well and good. The question is not about stopping stealing, stopping communists from stealing, stopping governments from stealing...

it is about how to prevent it from happening to you, as an individual.

This is bitcointalk afterall...could we not have a blockchain based reputation system to help with this?

A thief database like the child predator map? Know the level of thievery in your neighborhood/city/country in order to know how much money you need to spend on securing your property.

Nice analogy.... But in some countries where people survive below a 1$ a day as a result of the greed of the government stealing it's deemed the order of the day for survival.

I personally have never shopped at Amazon.  This is specifically because I don't like Bezos and don't wish to support him.  In the free market system I don't have to support people who I don't like and to a lesser degree, policies which I don't agree with.

The draw of socialism/communism with it's centrally planned economic activity model seems to be that people with unpopular ideas which don't work for shit can still maintain control through what is effectively extortion and racketeering of the populous.

But shouldn't robbery even be ok in the Cossack tradition?

All economic systems are forced redistribution of wealth.  When you shop at whole foods,  wealth is being redistributed to bezos, the purchase is taxed and that money is redistributed to build the road for bezos' trucks to drive on.  The labor value that went into the entire process has now been redistributed towards you in the form of prices lower than costs and again to bezos in the form of profit.  

The only way to avoid redistribution of wealth would be to live off the grid and not participate in any economy.

Stop advocating forced redistribution of wealth. Taking the property of others to redistribute is not charity, it is theft. Its really easy to be generous with other people's resources. Maybe you should put your money where your mouth is and take a vow of poverty and give all your shit away, then maybe I will bother to take you seriously. Until then go fuck yourself Comtard.

I'm not sure if its intentional or not but you continue to shift the discussion away from the system and onto me personally.  My goal is not to help myself financially.  I don't understand why you keep talking about that and its only making your posts a caricature of someone with no argument.  Its basically the  "leftists are failures in their parents basement" trope.

I already have too much.  My goal is to have a system where everyone has opportunity to develop regardless of the situation they are born into.  Making a bigger fortune would in no way change the system.  Even if I sold real estate at a livible price, I'd just be a charity representing a drop in the bucket of a failed system.  Not even Bezos could use his fortune to end this system.

Stop inserting my views into your thought process and try to understand my thought process.  Not everyone bases their world view on what will make them the most money.  Thats a scarcity mindset which is characteristic of the right.  I think about what would be best for all people in the present and future.  My goal being fulfilled would actually hurt me financially because I would no longer have the competitive advantage of having all of these things from birth.   Things that most people in the world have to work really hard just to have a chance at obtaining.

Its not even a good straw man to say I am envious of rich people.  Envious means you want what someone has for yourself.  Wanting what someone has to be spread amongst the less fortunate is far from envy.  At worst, I'm a hypocrite for continuing to participate in a system I've realized as evil.  That'd at least be an argument that makes sense.

No I don't think workers would all become entrepreneurs but they would all have a chance and more importantly they would all have a chance to give their kids food, shelter, medicine, and education.  I don't think thats too much to ask.  At that point, then I wouldn't care how much wealth was accumulated at the top because everyone would already have a chance.   Its only the idea that we can't afford basic services for all children that makes billionaires evil.  

I don't teach for the money.  That would be a sad way to live and luckily I'm privileged enough to have the security that allows me thrive doing something I love in this bullshit system.  The only thing hindering my happiness is living with the guilt of all I've stolen through passive income and externalized costs.  I teach to help fulfill my goal of changing the world.  The privileged kids I teach will grow up to have all of the power in the world and their education will influence them to make ethical decisions.  I'm sure things will change because the young generation is growing up aware of the externalized costs of capitalism.  Prices aren't low and profits aren't being made.  They are simply being stolen from people in other places and times.  The kids are onto it and the upcoming disasters will expose the scam of capitalism.

This is in fact how they see it, it is pointless to try to discuss this with communists. Any profit you make, is the result of "exploitation of the masses", therefore, you are a thief, and its only "natural" for the "proletariat" to seize it back, by force. Yes, its an ideology of violence, its called "class struggle" by them, something about Marx citing Hegels, blah, blah.

The Soviet Union is no more, but you can still try live in my country. See if 2 USD a month for a full time job is good to live, the "Socialist dream" here, where everything is free, but nothing works (healthcare, education, police, services, etc).

Funny thing is they seized "the means of production" from the "corrupt capitalists", and were "assigned" to the even more corrupt bureaucrats, who made all those companies go bankrupt. And now that the exploiter is the State, you cannot say a word or else you are an imperialist lackey and thrown to prison.

Now we have the highest inflation, and the highest emigration or the world...

^You needed a whole study to find out people are racist and have less trust for people who don't look like themselves?


You're mostly right but wrong about me thinking everyone should be paid the same.  I think people should be compensated for their ideas, initial investments, risk, and all the work they put into creating something but that does have a limit.  There is an actual value into the amount of work that went into that.  I'm not pretending to know what that value is in each case but I know that its a lot more than the typical worker, and a lot less than the unlimited percentage it has become through capitalism.  

Bezos, for example, definitely deserved to compensation for creating the company, but at some point, he had been fully compensated and everything beyond that is actually theft from the people who are keeping the company going and the people who are paying the true costs.  Profit gets magnified by passing costs onto other people and externalizing those costs from the company budget.  The best companies are experts at doing this.  Making someone else pay your costs is a form of theft.  Even if you don't know who that person is, you're still stealing from them.  

Its a two way street.  Wouldn't you think its weird if you had to pay every employee who ever worked at your company for the rest of their life?  It makes sense that we pay workers for the work they did and thats it so why not do the same for the owners?

Society cannot function without labor.  A worker's mentality is necessary to maintain labor.  This is why capitalism is unsustainable.  You cannot endlessly redistribute wealth away from labor and towards the top.   Our current system depends on people believing in the scam that their work will pay off.   Eventually, the myth that hard work pays off will die.   There needs to be a more diverse market for capital.  If you put capital in the hands of many people, you would get a more ethical relationship between capital and labor because labor would have more opportunities to shop around for capital and negotiate "prices".   The current state of affairs means that the masses compete for who can offer the lowest priced labor to the very few people who have capital and those with capital rarely have to compete in a market for labor because they have millions of choices.  Its not a balanced market.


"Reeducation" is an interesting word choice for someone who fears the Soviet system.   The book idea is completely illogical.  Not only because  you're not going to teach morals out of someone, but because knowing how to function is not the problem.  The problem I have with capitalism is the people my success is stealing from.  Ignorance is on your side.  The most educated nations have all evolved into social democracies.   If everyone knew how the system worked, the American system would collapse in a day.   This is inevitably how capitalism will end.  The working class will eventually realize the game is rigged against them and quit or change the rules.  

There is no way to both effectively and ethically function in capitalism.  You have to pick one of the two. You can either be the rich thief or the poor working fool.  There is only some in-between because of government intervention that exists in spite of capitalism.  

"New Peer Reviewed Academic Study Finds Diversity is Not a Strength"

https://summit.news/2019/10/07/new-peer-reviewed-academic-study-finds-diversity-is-not-a-strength/

What a bunch of nonsense. I read the first sentence and it already made me cringe.
Who is to decide what is work and what is not? What amount of time do I have to spend on a task for it to no longer be theft? You maybe?

I'm curious, what according to you is this "actual work"? Do I have to produce a physical object, like a brick, or maybe sweat all day in a labor camp? Those were the days of real men doing real work, right?

Same thing as the last guy pretty much.  You assume that just because I reject capitalism, that I adopt some other form of theft.  Its a complete strawman.  Feeling guilty about a life of luxury based on stolen wealth is not "ungrateful".  Its called humility.

Not only do people like me exist, but in my community, we leftists vastly outnumber capitalists.  I've spent the last 10 years living in neighborhoods where nearly everyone is successful by the capitalist definition(these are highly sought after neighborhoods), rejects capitalism, and believes in pacifism.  The faculty at the colleges and high schools I've worked at have also fallen into this group.  My echo chamber reality got so bad that in 2015, I thought it was just how the entire country had morphed.   I'm actually quite often finding myself to the right of my peers.  The other day, I was even scolded by guests I invited over because they found whole foods bags in my kitchen. How could I be so selfish to shop anywhere other than the local food coop?

Its only when I go home, or on the internet that I am exposed to people who are both educated and still believe in capitalism.  Finding that balance is part of why I'm here.

Its telling how quickly such a discussion turns into ad hominem attacks.  Anyone who holds a different world view must be uneducated, ignorant, unsuccessful, or all of the above. Well these type of attacks are actually a concession that you have no ability to refute my points with reasonable argument.  
Yeah making money off of money instead of actual work is usually theft.  Of course risk exists.  Usually the people with the most risk make the least money.  There are dozens of workers dangling high above ground risking their lives to complete construction on an tower and all the investors are risking is the potential of maybe having to go back to doing actual work to earn a living.  

If you were interested in a real discussion, you'd ask about my life instead of making assumptions but then it wouldn't be as easy to create strawman arguments.
 I've been privileged enough to never have to work a miserable job but I realize most people aren't afforded such a luxury.  People working these types of jobs you assume I'm in are usually supporters of capitalism as they don't have time to think about philosophy of life, what could be, and reflect on the characteristics of economic systems.  They don't have that freedom because they have to live in reality and focus on day to day survival.   If the people you describe me as were anticapitalist, the system wouldn't survive very long. The current state of affairs relies on the people you have described having faith in the doctrine that if they keep working hard in their retail job, they too will one day be rich.

Its also a non argument to assume I don't understand the system or participate in it just because I think its evil.    It would be more reasonable to call me a hypocrite.  I grew up in capitalism and its all I've lived under.  I've benefited from it.  I've accumulated more wealth than most humans will ever see simply because I was born into a good situation.  I know how easy passive income is and that helps me categorize it as theft.  I worked in mortgage to pay my way through undergrad.  I've inherited rental property and mined cryptocurrency.  Of course I know what passive income is and understand how capital works.  Thats all a huge part of why I'm so against it.  Most of my jobs have paid me more than what others make for the same work simply because of where my degree came from which all goes back the private school education I was born into.  I'll never forget how much work it took to spend 30 minutes at a closing signing a dozen papers for a rental property that gives me the right to half of someone's paycheck every month just because of this imaginary ownership.  

 I grew up and was fine with the system until I traveled outside of my bubble and realized life wasn't so easy for everyone else and that all of this came at the expense of others.  Most capitalists are completely separated from the people they affect so they don't understand the relationship between profit, labor, and capital. As a teacher who has spent time in poor schools, I'm able to see the world from just about every perspective.  

The funny thing about your post is even if the ad hominem attacks you made up were true, they would still be terrible points.  Theres even an accurate saying on the right that academia is full of leftists and here you are assuming that a someone is uneducated because they believe profit is theft.   Its one thing to disagree and think someone is wrong but to say the other side is stupid just because you are afraid of their ideas is not even an argument at all.

Lastly, this "capitalism vs soviet union/north korea" point is a false dichotomy.  Totalitarianism is not the opposite of capitalism.  I don't want a utopia either.  I just want an end to obvious theft and inequality.  BTW, the rich in North Korea still live pretty well. 

Unfortunately he claims to be some sort of professional educator. He doesn't have any business training dogs let alone humans. The idea that he is in a position to educate (indoctrinate) anyone is a terrifying concept. These types of people serve only one purpose, to spread Marxism like a virus. After all, if your values are wrong and warped and you are unwilling to accept that, the only option is to normalize it by warping as many others as possible much like a drug addict enables other drug addicts in order to feel more normal and ignore their destructive behavior. Marxism is just collectivized mental illness.

Maybe we can consider every side of the story but there must be no person can be above the law. Whatever the reason if someone breaks the law, they must be jailed. Probably, stealing was a crime in every country so it should be address based on the countrie's constitution.
In some countries this crime was common but in every country this kind of behaviour do exist. I believe that the best choice is for them to be jailed if they commit such crime.

This is funny because my country is technically in the "west" (south of USA), and yet its just like what you describe for "others". And the funny thing is, i traveled once to the east, the far east, and the description fits perfectly what you said about "the west". No bars? No guard checking your bags at the door of the shop? you can actually grab the things yourself? Yup.

My country used to be "nice", so its not like the concept was unknown to me. But in the last two decades or so, it has degraded so much its now the other, more dangerous and miserable type. Yes i remember those nice days, but the young people here never lived those.

What to do with thieves? Well the good old book says... bring the hand guillotine?

In my country theft most almost always involves firearms, because a thief without one has a very high chance of being killed on the spot (or left disabled for the rest of his life). And in many attempts, the victims die. Either because of resisting, or the thieve going nervous, or the police coming and shooting (here the heroic Hollywood cop does not exist, here is "shoot first, ask later" (infamous words or a former President of this very nation). And wait until you learn about the prisons, you don't want to learn about the prisons, trust me. "University of crime" they are infamously named, for the ones that survive it...

Investing in the smart kid's education is not theft, its the profit you make off of it that is the theft.  You said you would expect a percentage of that kids lifetime earnings.  That could end up being a loan with 10,000% interest or more.  Of course it would be theft.  The opportunity cost is that you could have used your money to steal someone else's labor.  Of course I know that and in a world with so many deprived, there will always be someone to steal from.  This is why a capitalist system requires poverty in order to get rich.  If everyone had education, this student loan business would fail.  This provides incentive for people like you to make sure adequate access to education is never a reality. 

You keep misinterpreting my ethical disagreement with the system on moral grounds as a lack of understanding the system.  I'm against the system BECAUSE i understand it. 

Why is it that poor people buying drugs is so bad but rich people buying drugs is "capital finding its way into the hands of people who appreciate it" .   You continue to show a double standard
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/sep/16/middle-class-consume-more-drugs-and-alcohol-than-poorer-people

Money is literally just a right to the time and resources of other people.  By saying billionaires should exist, you are declaring that they have a right to unlimited time and resources of the poor.  Money is always being printed and spent.  Its really just a matter of what we should spend it on and who that should benefit.

If money is infinite, why won't they let me print any of it? Of course, I could start my own ICO, right?