I have an extended family member who is a life long thief. First it started with shoplifting. Then it evolved to breaking into cars, then homes, and eventually banks. He has been in & out of prison for 40 years. When asked how his conscience allowed him to steal so much from so many, his response was simple: “They all have insurance. What’s the big deal?”
Such are the pathetic views of a lifelong criminal. How is it that the same excuse is now being used by prominent Democrats?
Lifelong criminals? Democrats? Hmmmm. What could they possibly have in common?
so are televangelists
Some are. But this sounds like prejudice. Like blacks are naturally criminals.
Socialism is theft.
Communism is armed robbery.
So is socialism.
Socialism is suicide, communism is murder.
Matt is the most principled youtube political commentator I know of.
Robert, what makes you think all the rioters are lifelong criminals? I think many of them are just brainwashed libtards.
To be precise, I never said that rioters are lifelong criminals. They are just using the same excuses as one I personally know.
I have said it before. One day a Liberal will lose a close family member to accident or crime. I will smuggly remind them, “That’s why you have insurance!”
The argument for theft and looting is completely morally bankrupt. This is right out of the Marxist and socialist playbook. “Redistribution of wealth, Property ownership is theft”. It is the politics of envy and is the foundation of absolute evil and has been played out many times in history. I am pretty sure that in school and university, history is an elective and what is taught is highly suggestive,
To end this the entire humanities and social sciences at every publicly funded educational institution needs to be defunded in its entirety.
Shooting looters is morally justifiable and negates the need for contortions in arguing the case.
Well duh,as a justification for yet another handout to those who refuse to support themselves,our NDP is on the record as stating;”We must supply this benefit ,cause these people will just steal what they want otherwise.
The Never Done Paying principle at its finest.
Of course the oldest joke of the bureaus;”Do not steal,your government hates competition”.
Which is true from every angle.
Until we impose a bounty on the head of every do-gooder and “Liberal Style Assault Politician” we will remain socially crippled and doomed to sink forever deeper into the power of the Kleptocracy.
Mr John Robertson,
“Liberal Style Assault Politician”, I like this term. The next time a liberal starts spouting off around me, I’ll use that phrase, and when I get the blank stare, the head scratch, the head cocked to one side, I’ll lay into them on how that term’s use is so idiotic, when used in defining firearms, but is essentially, a very apt description of the current Liberal government politicians, especially Trudeau, Blair, and Freeland.
What’s the difference between Ottawa and Joyceville?
Twenty IQ points.
It’s just property
The equivalency is not between “a life” and “an item of property”.
The point is that the peaceful ownership of property is a natural human right, equal in importance to “life” and “liberty”
Civilized society requires all three.
Property is the means, the equipment to sustain life. Taking it from me is a step on the way to taking away my life. Let’s not go that way.
The ultimate value of money it its utility at managing the distribution of scarce resources. The Soviet system had no money as we today recognise it. Money in the Soviet sustem was calibrated to labour intensity – what is known by Marxists as the labour theory of value. Think of $1 as equivalent to 5 minutes’ work. (That’s how you get a $12per hour “minimum wage”). The trouble with the Soviet system was 5 minutes was 5 minutes. The obvious problem is “whose 5 minutes?”. That of a brain surgeon? A rocket scientist? A gender studies social activist? A youtube personality? The Soviet system says “a unit of labour is a unit of labour”. So who sets the prices? Well, ultimately a small team of bureaucrats decides what your labour is worth to the state. And you get paid that rate, no matter what? So all surgeons get the same pay rate. All janitors the same pay rate (oh no, SJWs, there is NO WAY the Soviets would pay a gender studies major the same as Messrs. Mikhoyan and Gurevich! They weren’t THAT stupid!).
So how do you stop people sitting on their ass all day surfing porn? It was especially rough if you weren’t in upper management.
Quotas. Production quotas.
And therein lies the rub: the quotas are to satisfy predicted (calculated) demand by the Soviet people. And at the end of the day, no matter the system, you need a way to cope with the distribution of scarce resources. Oddly enough, in the Soviet Union there was no shortage of labour! But there was a chronic shortage of value, once Western companies got hip to Soviet industrial espionage, and locked down their design secrets and stopped sharing information with them At that point, the Soviets could have military parity, or economic parity with the West. But not both. And of course bartering and outright accounting (bean counting) fraud was the only way to manage scarcity and surplus in a production quota system where price has nothing to do with demand. That and bartering. And the black market. So that means Gulags and firing squads if you are serious about being a disciple of Marx.
Our free enterprise system uses money as it always has been used through the ages: as a proxy for demand. Think of $1 not as 5 minutes’ of time, but as a measure of how badly you need something. This is partly why coffee is $2 and a place to live is hundreds of thousands. The other part is the production and procurement costs being passed along by the market to the “demander”. Someone who puts a house up for sale for $2 and is charging $600k for a cup of coffee is in for a rather interesting time … Bids will come stampeding in for the house, but he’ll wonder what, exactly, is wrong with the coffee.
The Soviets would have made the coffee $200 and the house $10k, you know, “for social justice”. Then they’d be shocked that there’s a brutal housing shortage, and a riduculous glut of coffee. Trying to provide the necessary exogenous shocks at the right time, place, and size to manage a command economy makes daytrading seem like a slamdunk.
The free enterprise system is not perfect, but it does a better job of pricing things … provided massive money printing is kept in check. The Soviets tried to use a one-dimensional mechanism (labour) to solve a two-dimensional problem (supply and demand)
If you print and print and print, you can set minimum wage at $1,000,000 an hour. (If you ask SJWs what’s wrong with that, they can’t tell you, can they?) But what have you done? You have simply changed your measuring stick for units of demand. Like swapping between feet and inches.
If money is not at all aligned to overall productivity, and demand for our goods and services, if it is simply printed, and printed, and printed, it really doesn’t have any meaning, at some point. Like using 64ths of an inch to measure farmland.
By the way, the point is if they keep stealing, insurers will very quickly stop insuring (well, not really, they’ll just jack rates to the moon, accordingly).
At some point we either print more money, or we spend 89% of our income (product of our labour and ingenuity) insuring things. But then then the scale, availability and quality of those things starts to drop as more amd more resources are diverted.
The ancients knew this, which is why they treated theft so harshly.
But we have figured out that you can adequately service debt by just borrowing more!
Which is fine, as long as future productivity and value add keep growing at the same rate indefinitely. But that is one HELL of a big bet on future earnings.
BDSM this was the best explanation of basic economics I have seen in a long time, not overly complicated just perfectly descriptive and to the point. I would bet that even the average SJW could figure it out after 4 or 5 readings between setting fire to buildings and trashing Police cars.
Guarantee they’re gonna confiscate guillotines next. 🙂
Insurance?
Wow.
Maybe the Arab countries are right about sawing off hands.