Theft - Stealing Bits of One's Life
- gpatgamma
- Sep 1
- 4 min read
“Is your property worth more than someone’s life?”
Property is normally acquired through work. Work in its simplest fashion is a transaction trading time and effort for financial renumeration. In a very real sense the things you buy represent the “sale” of portions of your life for cash. So a thief is not just stealing an object the thief is stealing a portion of your life.
The thief values that property so much that he is willing to risk being killed, wounded or imprisoned to possess that property. His risk assessment is twofold – what is the likelihood of getting caught and facing death, injury or imprisonment and if he is caught what are the chances he can mitigate the downsides by force or guile. In the second part of the assessment the thief relies on gullible people who downplay the seriousness of thievery and desperately seek to find an excuse for the anti-social behavior.
If the proposition was examined objectively, one could ask why is the owner’s life represented in the property they worked to obtain of less value than the thief’s live? Two propositions have been proven through years of research to deter crime, certainty of punishment and severity of punishment. In recent studies the idea of celerity has been added, the swiftness of punishment after the crime.[i] The liberal leaning people who spout the line that started this article simply do not understand those factors and if they do, they chose to discount them in favor of punishing the owners and rewarding the criminal.
This is a manifestation of the trend in liberal policies – the oppressed-oppressor matrix. The logic in this matrix is that the world is fundamentally two classes, people who oppress and exploit others for personal gain and the oppressed who are victims and helpless to change their state except through violence, In the case of the person who works (trades time and effort for money) to buy items they desire, that person is the oppressor!
As an oppressor the person takes advantage of his or her skin color, ethnicity or some other immutable factor to exploit the victims for money. While this may not be direct exploitation the fact that this worker is employed by a company allows the liberal to dump the “evils of capitalism” of the worker thus forcibly joining them to the oppressor class. The thief, due to skin color, ethnicity or some other immutable factor is joined to the oppressed class and has a right to take -even violently- the property of the oppressor. In fact the theft from the wealthy is celebrated in far left circles.[ii]
Why is theft wrong then? Many liberals do not think it is.
“Most people think that the actual distribution of property poorly reflects moral entitlement. Were wealth to be justly distributed, some people would have more than they currently possess; others, less. Theft is one means by which a more just distribution could be pursued. ”[iii]
The paragraph above assumes some facts not in evidence.
First, the distribution of wealth in a society should be evenly distributed regardless of talent and effort. If that were the case in the NFL or NBA, the worst players would get the same salary as the superstars. This is a talent-based argument for unequal outcomes. In the business world, if a person starts a small company, risking their personal resources, and diligently invests time and effort to build a multi-million dollar company, then the fruits of that labor seem to rightly accrue to that person. This is an effort-based argument for unequal outcomes.
The liberal viewpoint is that simply being a person entitles one to share the wealth that everyone else generates. Much like the story of the college professor who told the class that they would share the highest grade.
There is great merit in Aesop’s fable about the grasshopper and the ant. It is a timeless tribute to the value of work and planning for the future. The result was that those who studied hard for the mid-term felt cheated because those who partied all night got the same grade. The result was the class failed the final because no one studied.[iv]
The other viewpoint is that theft is morally wrong because it deprives a person of the benefits of property legally obtained through work – trading a portion of your life for money. A thief is not just taking a item, a thief is stealing your life. It is a well-known legal precept that all humans have the right of self defense. One could argue that defending your property is simply an extension of self defense. If you cannot defend those segments of your life invested in your property then your right to self defense has been stolen also.
The next time you hear some celebrity or left-wing mouthpiece start the argument about how callous conservatives are to value their property over another person’s life ask them to explain the logic. What makes a thief’s life more valuable than a property owner? The answer you will likely get will default to the oppressed-oppressor matrix. Imagine the twisted pretzel shape the liberal's mind must assume when a poor white man robs a rich black lady.
[iii] Ibid
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