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[+] -22 points 1 week ago (25 children)

You're talking about deeper issues here though. What you really mean is that the underlying problem is the government and how they're in bed with big business.

That doesn't mean it's OK to steal. Robin Hood - you know the story of Robin Hood, ya? Stole from the rich and gave to the poor? But he didn't, not at all. Robin Hood was a friend of King Richard, the richest of all. He took back what the Sherriff stole from the people - which isn't theft. You cannot steal that in which does not belong to you.

And your claims are grand so they require grand evidence. What is an example of a large business stealing from individuals on a grand scale? Disliking your pay or disliking the cost of goods/services isn't theft, that's consensual adult human interaction. If you don't like the deal, don't consent to it. You can vote with your wallet and labor.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 days ago (8 children)

    Holy fuck are you doingthestuff’s new account since his got nuked for being Nazi bootlicking scum like you?

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  • [–] 0 points 5 days ago (7 children)

    I don't know who that is. I'm not a Nazi. I am anti-government, in fact.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 days ago (6 children)

    So anti-government that you want them to come and prosecute someone who allegedly stole a pack of diapers?

    Lol. Lmao.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 days ago (5 children)

    I never said that.

    A cop's role should be to analyze a situation and if given probable cause, make an arrest. That detained individual is then given a trial - assuming the victim(s) wants to press charges - and if convicted of the crime through due process, punished accordingly.

    I never once said what I felt should have happened in this particular situation. Not once. In fact, I've openly admitted that I do not have enough information to know what went wrong.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 days ago (4 children)

    If you want the cops to come deal with the alleged theft you’re not anti-government. You are explicitly describing how you want the government to function.

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  • [–] -1 points 4 days ago (3 children)

    Oh for sure. When I say I am anti-government I'm referring to current-age governments. The only just government would be one where violence is only utilized to protect people from things like murder, rape, theft, and fraud. Government wouldn't take any taxes at all, as all funding would be consensual. Government would fundamentally function as any other business and would need to provide quality enough goods and services to warrant people paying them for them.

    At this state, "government" would be kind of a silly idea. It would be like if in this neighborhood you paid Amazon for Amazon Protective Services at $19.99 a month and over there, Microsoft Safeguard, for $22.99/month.

    And you would send your kids to a "private" school (the notion of public property is a misnomer), and more or less nothing would be RUN by a single overarching government. There would still be costs and if you refused to partake you wouldn't receive those services.

    Take roads, for example. In the future one option would be for homeowner groups to band together and buy up stretches of roads. Then those groups could further get together and make large-scale arrangements. Say 100 different such groups all created a Road of Virginia Association where 90% of the roads in the state of Virginia are owned by that organization. Now that group sets their own rules and governances. Maybe what they do is say, to drive on our roads you have to pass tollways where your car is scanned and you pay online per scan - maybe something as trivial as like, $0.10 a toll or something. Then other groups could follow suit.

    If some billionaire bought up a stretch of road and said you have to pay me $1,000 a month to drive on it, nobody is going to drive on it, or other people could get together and just build a parallel road and drive on that, or more people/businesses will just blacklist that asshole from things (because now we have TRUE freedom of association), or maybe more people utilize drones so roads become more and more unneccesary.

    There's an infinite number of potential solutions but a tyrannical top-down government was never a good one. The answer across time has always been less government. We're moving in that direction, for the most part it seems anyway. There are fewer dictatorships today than ever before. Fewer atrocities committed to a nation's own peoples than in past times. Fewer entire nations wiped clean from the planet than ever before. More people climbing out of poverty than any time prior.

    I'm not stupid. I don't anticipate any semblance of utopia. Life is messy, and it always will be.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 days ago (2 children)

    Capitalism is a top down tyranical system. You get that, right? There is no such thing as an anarcho-capitalist, you’re literally Just a capitalist.

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  • [–] 0 points 4 days ago (1 child)

    I'm more than happy to reply to everything you've said here so we can have a discussion.

    So you first made the claim that capitalism is a top-down tyrannical system. We need to define our terms here otherwise all we're doing is arguing semantics.

    I don't know what you mean by capitalism, but what I mean is how it is typically defined by most major dictionaries. For example, Merriam-Webster defines capitalism as follows:

    : an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market

    So let's break that down. Of course it's a system, I don't think we need to elaborate on that, but it also details the specific characteristics of what make it a system, including private or corporate ownership - which is a key. It specifies what kinds of goods, but "capital goods" isn't well defined even by the dictionary. Merriam-Webster again for example defines capital (within this context) as accumulated goods devoted to the production of other goods, but it also defines it as a stock, or as the underlying value of accumulated goods. For the sake of my argument, I am going to just say that capital means, "stuff". It's an X variable. I can place anything I want into it.

    And I don't think we need to define a good because a good in this context is just something you can trade that isn't a service. Mowing your lawn is a service, selling you a lawn mower is a situation where the lawn mower itself is a "good".

    So by capital goods I just mean any goods or services, which can be literally anything. I can sell you an idea, I can sell you a poem I've saved to a computer file, I can sell you the service of mowing your lawn for you, I can sell you a lawn mower, I could mow your lawn for the trade where you shovel my driveway, etc.

    So then capitalism is defined as a system characterized by private or corporate ownership of goods and services (X variable). But this is a silly definition because there is no other form of ownership other than private ownership. So let's define what ownership is. If we don't understand what ownership is, we cannot continue our conversation.

    Ownership can only be one thing. It is a state of human will in which a person desires exclusive authority over something but did not engage in any actions of which violates the will of another as it pertained to that something within a logical order of operations. It is logically impossible to own that in which you've stolen and it is also just as impossible to steal something you already own.

    You can explain ownership like this: If you are walking through the woods and find a diamond on the ground that nobody in the world even knows exists and you suddenly manifest a desire to have exclusive authority over that diamond, you own it. It is that simple. This is because logically you fulfill both of the two requirements that do not create a logical contradiction. You do not own the ugly looking rock lying next to it because you simply do not care what happens to that, just like you do not own the dirt, the sticks, or the leaves you've been walking past that you care nothing about. If someone else came by later and took that ugly rock, you wouldn't bat an eyelash.

    Now since you own that diamond, if I come along later and see you with it and suddenly I also covet exclusive authority over it, I have fulfilled one logical requirement of ownership, but not both. In order for me to hold exclusive authority over that diamond which you already own, I would need to engage in some form of action of which violates your will as it pertains to your property. I.E: I would have to rob you - and if I do, I may possess exclusive authority over that diamond, but I do not own it because I stole it and I cannot own that in which I've stolen.

    If you can own something you stole then theft and ownership are meaningless as ideas and become synonyms for one another, and any non-logical definition of ownership is wholly arbitrary, which means it has no cardinal essence. Aristotle coined the idea of every idea possessing an "essence", which isn't some spiritual concept but one explained by every idea needs fundamental attributes of which manifest that idea as independent of other ideas.

    Annnnyway, so now we understand ownership. That said as we understand the underlying principles of what ownership has to be to not "not be", we realize that the idea of a public, private, or "corporate" ownership is nonsense. Public property for example is nonsense. The notion of public property is simply ruling class propaganda. If I trade someone my labor for money then I take that money and buy a lawn mower, it is my lawn mower. If we are neighbors and you come to my house asking if I would like to go 50/50 on a lawn mower that we both agree to work together to set boundaries for use and maintenance and the like, that isn't "public property", it's private property. It just means you and I shared - consensually - exclusive authority over that lawn mower apart from anyone else.

    Now if I come to you and demand you give me $500 to buy a lawn mower telling you it will be our public property even though you didn't consent, that isn't public property, it's just me stealing $500 from you to buy something you didn't ask for and letting you have some level of (maybe) authority over it, maybe. If I feel like it. "Public property" is just a political way of describing property obtained through stolen means.

    The same goes for corporate property. Unless there is a hierarchy of consent involved where there was an agreement between all parties that they all owned something, then there's no such thing, and in such a case that would still just be private property, or better yet, just remove the middle man there because there's only one form of property, which is just, "property".

    So now we can actually define capitalism.

    Capitalism then is a system characterized by ownership of goods and services. Everything else past that is just reiteration of the definition. Why continue on by noting concepts of pricing and distribution? If I have ownership, I have exclusive authority. With that authority I can choose to make trades with others. These trades can be investments, for favors, for other goods and services, as gifts, or I can even destroy that property.

    "Free market" at the end there is also another key facet of capitalism, and in order to have a free market you must be allowed to hold exclusive authority over your property. This means if you and I want to trade a lawn mower between the two of us and Joe from down the street shows up and uses coercion against us to stop us, we do not truly hold exclusive authority over our own property. Joe there is using violence to exhibit control over our property much like the state would in the instance where they impose certain regulations and laws.

    At the end of the day I simply thus define capitalism as a state in which people own their property. I would argue that most of the time anti-capitalists are defining capitalism in a sense of say, crony capitalism, which I, as a self-proclaimed capitalist, would outright deny is capitalism at all. Crony capitalism is generally defined as a system where you can give money to people who can make victimless laws, and if you are in a system of victimless laws that restrict you from holding exclusive authority over your property, you do not exist within the confines of a free market, a requirement for the manifestation of the idea of capitalism itself.

    Crony capitalism as an idea is extremely silly. That's like if I took an idea like driving a car and said, driving is bad, but what I really mean is, crony driving is bad, with crony meaning others can pay people to drive me off the road against my will, rendering driving dangerous. Well sure, but that isn't JUST driving. DRIVING isn't bad. The aspect that there's corruption leading to people trying to harm others who drive is bad. The "crony" is bad, not the capitalism.

    Now granted, you can define capitalism any way you like. Words are simply methods of which we communicate. A word doesn't really mean anything if we don't want it to. I hope you understand that too. If you want to define capitalism in a different way that's fine, but then you're no longer talking about the system I'm talking about.

    I have never met a self-proclaimed capitalist by the way who was in favor of any semblance of crony capitalism. All of the capitalists I know are in favor of the free market, where you and everyone else simply holds exclusive authority over your property.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

    Read a bit here and there. You’re fucking delusional or you have a tenuous grasp on politics and society in general.

    Not only are you a capitalist, you’re also a blind idealist. You are just the worst. You’re getting your politics from the dictionary, that’s not how that works. Read up on political history.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 days ago* (2 children)

    So, because Robin Hood wasn’t the character from the stories in real life that equates to it’s never ok to steal from anyone, ever, no matter what?

    Is all violence the exact same thing to you, as well, Javert?

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  • [–] 1 point 5 days ago (1 child)

    Theft is never acceptable, no. There is an objective and logical reason as to why this is. Morality simply is the concept of actions we - meaning people - should or should not commit to. Morality does not apply to nature, simply meaning that in which sits outside of the frame of those with personhood - it only applies to people.

    So the question becomes, how do we know which actions we should or should not commit to? Well, you can answer this logically, and quite simply, actually.

    You already understand that you never want anyone else to violate your will. It is in fact logically impossible to desire the violation of your own will because that in which you will is what you want. If you say one minute that you don't want me to punch you in the face but then the next minute you're OK with it, it is not that your will is such that you wish it to be violated, it is that your will has changed.

    And since it is not objectively possible to place the subjective in a structure of hierarchy without that hierarchy being utterly arbitrary, you cannot set value to will. For example, say there is a diamond and both of us desire exclusive authority over it. I cannot make any claims of my desire over this diamond that objectively supersede your desires. Thus, there is no way for us to mandate who deserves the diamond as predicated solely on our feelings.

    That being said, because you understand that it would never be permissible to you that I violate your will, it can never be permissible for you to violate mine. So at this juncture all we need to set is the logical standards for how a system of human conflict must work.

    Think of it like this - I'll set up a thought experiment example:

    You are the only human being on earth and are walking through the woods. You find a diamond on the ground and pick it up. Immediately your will is to hold exclusive authority over that diamond. You want to be the one who decides what happens to it and you would be upset if the diamond became lost, damaged, or otherwise out of your control.

    Who has ownership over that diamond? Well, you do. Not because anyone said so, but because it is the only possible outcome in this scenario. You desire exclusive authority over it and there is no other human will of which to contest your will. Those are actually the two logical criteria for ownership. Anything else is just referring to some level of authoritarian justification to mandate that your desires supersede the desires of another. Basically, arbitration through might.

    Now imagine I pop into the world and see you with that diamond and I also manifest a will desiring exclusive authority over it. Now how would I obtain my will? Well, I would need to violate your will, which preexists mine. This is actually the logical order of operations of which manifests the idea of theft, mind you. If you had passed by that diamond without a second thought and it wouldn't bother you one bit had I come along later and coveted it as my own, then you never desired ownership and thus, did not hold ownership over the diamond in the first place and as such, I did not need to do anything to another will in order to make mine manifest.

    This is why you can own something and gift it, sell it, trade it, or discard it, and the next person to hold ownership over it obtained it through moral means. Keep in mind that it is impossible to own that in which you've stolen just as it is impossible to steal that in which you already own. The constructs of ownership and theft require one another for the other to exist as ideas. If you can own something you've stolen then the very ideas of ownership and theft become arbitrary, and now we're arguing semantics, not ideas.

    I can take something from you (like taxes, let's say), and tell you that isn't theft because I have a uniform on, wear a badge, have some kind of formal sounding title, or because I tell you it's legitimate, but none of that renders the act either legitimate nor moral. Taxation is theft not because I say so, but because the cardinal essence (see Aristotle) of the idea itself mandates it.

    It does not matter if you're starving to death for instance and you steal food from me, even if I have so much food that I could feed the both of us for 1,000 years, the act of stealing the food itself is an act of theft and every act of theft is objectively immoral because it is logically so. You would never suffer another to violate your will as it pertained to any of your possessions either, including but not limited to food.

    What you are likely doing is misconstruing your personal, subjective views of morality. You are allowed to FEEL that someone with food for both of us for 1,000 years who won't give some to a starving person is a bad person, and there's nothing intrinsically wrong with that. I would agree with you on that front (though there may be exceptions, such as say, someone asking for you food who already tried to murder you or your family.)

    But personal feelings do not mean it is morally correct to rob them. The logic of that sentiment is extremely nefarious and can be used to mandate literally anything, because it's wholly arbitrary. To use the funny, silly, and stereotypical example of Hitler here, if Hitler decided that the Jews all needed to be destroyed, he is using a similar argument of emotion without logic. He is mandating that his personal, emotional, arbitrary views hold more value than the will of those he means to slaughter because he believes himself to hold greater wisdom then his victims, which is not objectively true.

    There is no such thing as the wiser man or the lesser will. To even say that you are entitled to my food for example because you are starving is to stipulate that life itself holds a level of value that is absolute, and it doesn't. A man for example can value anything over the value of life, and all of us actually already do this. If given the choice that a random stranger die, or your child, who would you choose? Let's make the situation even simpler, what if it were a child rapist's life, or your child? So you already agree that life itself has arbitrary value.

    With what respect might be owed to you as a stranger on the internet my estimate is you've never thought high enough level about any of this as you're still at a low-level of thinking which is predicated principally on emotion. I do not mean offense in saying that, mind, but you might want to take a step back and think your positions through carefully first.

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  • [–] 14 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    Get bent apologist.

    This report assesses the prevalence and magnitude of one form of wage theft—minimum wage violations (workers being paid at an effective hourly rate below the binding minimum wage)—in the 10 most populous U.S. states. We find that, in these states, 2.4 million workers lose $8 billion annually (an average of $3,300 per year for year-round workers) to minimum wage violations—nearly a quarter of their earned wages. This form of wage theft affects 17 percent of low-wage workers, with workers in all demographic categories being cheated out of pay.

    https://www.epi.org/publication/employers-steal-billions-from-workers-paychecks-each-year/

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  • [–] 1 point 5 days ago

    That isn't theft.

    The notion of a minimum wage is both arbitrary and authoritarian. It is no business of the third party to tell two adults how they can trade. There is no such thing as, "losing money annually because of minimum wage laws". You're not cheated because someone with a badge they created themselves tells you you're owned something because they claim to be the authority.

    Authority is fake. Government is an illusion. You've been brainwashed.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 week ago (9 children)

    You can't vote while you're starving. Wage theft is theft

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  • [–] 1 point 5 days ago (8 children)

    Theft is theft. What theft is, fundamentally, is when a person enacts an action upon another in which violates the will of the other within a logical order of operations as it pertains to their property.

    For example, if you find a diamond in the woods that nobody else even knows exists and you desire exclusive authority over it then you own it. You don't own it because I say so, you own it through a logical system because it literally cannot exist in any other feasible structure that isn't wholly arbitrary. You own it because you did not violate the will of another in order to own it, and you own it because you desire to own it.

    If someone else came along and picked up a rock that was lying next to that diamond and you do not care at all about it, then you did not own that rock to begin with and thus, the other person did not rob you in order to claim ownership over that rock.

    But if you are with that diamond and someone else comes along and thinks they deserve that diamond more than you but the only way they can manifest their desire of exclusive authority over the diamond is to engage in an action of which violates your will, they would need to steal it from you, and you cannot own that in which you've stolen, nor can you steal that in which you own.

    No other claim can be made rationally that dictates who should own that diamond. It doesn't matter if the other person has 10 other diamonds and you have none. It doesn't matter if that other person has food and you do not and that diamond could get you food. None of that matters, and you actually agree that it doesn't matter because you already understand and act out in this world per a cardinal rule that you could never suffer another to violate your will, whatever it might be.

    This is like the golden rule but 'The Golden Rule' is the ethical principle of treating others as you would want to be treated, but that concept is wholly flawed, because it does not take into account that humans have conflicting wills. Maybe I want to be punched in the fact, so the golden rule would then stipulate that I get to punch you in the face. Or what if you want a beautiful woman to have sex with you, do I get to rape her, then?

    This principle is similar to the golden rule except that you have to understand that it is go unto others as THEY would want you to do to them, plus a little extra. More or less, human conflicts of wills are always contradictory and there are only two ways to resolve a will conflict, either arbitrary, or logically.

    We both want X but only one of us can have X. How do we figure out who gets X?

    Well I can murder you and take X, and that's arbitrary because I just decided I want X more which is not a quantifiable stance. OR we understand that if I had X first I would not want you to take it from me and since you have X first, realizing this, I choose not to take it from you. That is the fundamental principle of ownership vs. theft.

    Theft is when will is violated as it pertains to ownership. Ownership is a desire to own where you did not violate the will of another to obtain exclusive authority over. it's that simple.

    Everything else is nonsense.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 days ago* (7 children)

    we both can have X if we work together against the bourgeoise

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  • [–] 1 point 4 days ago (6 children)

    This is nonsense though. There is no bourgeoise. Bourgeoise is a placeholder for whatever it is you decide it is. I've studied Marx extensively. Marx's constructs were fundamentally rooted in a notion outlined in an older age where there were individuals who owned things like factories, and workers in those factories. Today, what constitutes as capitol could be construed as anything that can make someone money. My computer is capitol, because I make a lot of money with it. in fact, different leftists will argue this exact concept. The "movement" can't even all agree on what socialism should start as and what the end-game of communism would actually be.

    The notion of communism is in no small part utterly nonsensical. The spiritual concept of communism being a system without government or money, but to stipulate that is to assert a nonsense argument and shows a lack of fundmental understanding of what either government or money is.

    Government could be fundamentally described as any relative force monopoly. If the formal government dissolved tomorrow and the people in my neighborhood got together and agreed to protect one another from others vandalizing, stealing, or doing harm to the people therein, that is a small government. If another neighboring government came with threats of violence and overtook them and forced their rules upon them, that was just a small war where one government prevailed. You cannot "do away with government". Money is similar. You cannot do away with money. Money isn't even real. Roughly 90 to 92% of the world's money is actually digital - 1's and 0's. It isn't real stuff, it's basically some kind of merit that trades had happened or are promised to happen in the future. If I mow your lawn in the summer and come winter ask you to plow my driveway and you keep refusing, I'll mentally tally how unwilling to return my favors to you are until eventually I start refusing to help you. This is money - it's just another way of looking at it.

    Removing money means removing hierarchy, and that isn't possible. The mere thought that you believe communism is even a workable system in concept shows a lack of understanding of concept. There isn't a single human alive who will not put things into a hierarchical structure of some sort based on how they feel in the moment or their fears of the future, whatever they may be.

    If we both want X we have to figure out how X is made and either work together to make X or trade consensually with those who can make X.

    What is bad? Murder, rape, theft, fraud. We can work together to stop the bad. That should be our goal. In doing so, we will, through proxy, reduce the problems that arise in our modern societies.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 days ago (2 children)

    An average worker generates hundreds of thousands of dollars of value a year. How much do they get paid? 60 thousand? That is wage theft

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  • [–] 1 point 4 days ago

    If I start a lemonade stand and charge $2.00 a glass and it costs me $0.50 a glass to make and I can sell 10 glasses an hour, I will make $20 an hour with a cost of $5, so my take-home will be $15 an hour.

    If I can add you as an employee and now we can sell 20 glasses an hour I can generate $30 an hour in revenue, so now I need to decide what I can/should pay you and you have to decide if you think that's fair.

    If I pay you $0.50 per glass then you make $10 an hour and I now make $20 an hour, but I made that before I had an employee, so why am I hiring you?

    And if I pay you even a penny more than $0.50 per glass I'm actually a charity now, because I'm making less money with you than I was on my own.

    So I can only rationally pay you anywhere from 0.01 per glass to 0.49 per glass, and when you start getting closer and closer to 0.50 per glass it starts making less and less sense to hire you.

    This also isn't a partnership. I realized there was a market for lemonade, I invested my money to buy the table, the glasses, the lemons, sugar, ice, containers, signs, etc. You came along and offered to help me make more lemonade, so if you accepted say, $0.35 per glass you would make $7.00 an hour and I would make $23.00 per hour.

    This is in both of our benefits, you see. I can make $20 an hour on my own so you helping me helps me make an additional $3 per hour, but without my employment, you make $0.00, so now you make $7.00. You can't make more than $10.00 remember, not unless this is just a charity, and if that's the case then why don't I just work on my own and GIVE you $10 an hour in charity? There's no difference.

    Everyone actually benefits when I make a profit. It incentivizes me to hire you, you make more money than zero, and more people can have lemonade because now we can provide 20 glasses per hour instead of 10.

    This is how prices are meant to be set too. If I set the price at $3.00 per glass and only 5 people per hour buy, I will only make $15 an hour minus costs, which is $0.50 * 5 = $2.5 so in total, I will make $12.5 an hour, but if I set the price at $2.00 per glass and 10 people an hour buy, I make $15 an hour after expenses.

    So highest prices possible does not equate to more for me as the business owner. I need to negotiate a price with my customers, which is also a negotiation of quality, and a negotiation with my employees (which is also a negotiation of quality).

    These things also aren't this simple. I'm obviously simplifying this dramatically. There are a lot more factors at play here too. For instance:

    What if hiring someone else ups the number of glasses we can sell from 20 an hour to 25? Do I hire them instead of you? If I hire them both, do I pay you both the same or only based on your respective values? If I can make 10 glasses an hour and you can make 10 but this other person can make 15, in total we can make 35 glasses an hour. At $2.00 per glass with a cost of $0.50 per glass this is a grand total of $52.50 an hour.

    So at $52.50 an hour I have to pay both of you but I cannot pay you combined more than a set amount or I would make more than if I never hired you. Now what happens if your work dwindles and you start only producing 7 glasses per hour? What if you don't show up for work frequently? What if the guy down the road, who claims to be government, comes by and tells me I now have to pay his neighbor $0.10 per cup for his service he's calling "insurance"?

    Here's the bottom line: If you don't want to make $7.00 an hour, don't agree to work for me. Why didn't you start up your own lemonade stand and sell lemonade for $1.75 a glass and put me out of business then?

    In the end, there is no such thing as wage theft, there are simply negotiations and consent. You are completely free not to agree and not work for me at that price. If I can't get anyone to work at $4.00 an hour I will have to raise my offer, won't I? In fact, it's likely in my best interest to give you a good offer just like it is to give my customers a good offer. If you are the best and you can make 20 glasses an hour then I don't want my competitor to have you, so I want to give you the best offer I can, don't I?

    Most of these "labor theory of value" arguments often come from third world or third world adjacent countries where the respective governments are fundamentally still quite tyrannical and/or where the belief structures are very collectivst.

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