No, Money is Not Theft

Capitalist vs. Socialist: Fish Edition

“Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.”

Let’s run with this analogy for a bit to explore capitalism vs socialism. I’ve heard that communism is actually different from socialism, but that line is much more blurry in my mind, so we will stick to just capitalism and socialism.

Capitalism is one man who has the ability to fish, and another does not. The poor man asks for fish, and is instead offered a deal. Help with the process of catching fish by maintaining boats, moving crates, gutting the fish… whatever he is able to do. The poor man turned employee is given fish based on the amount of value he contributes, and perhaps is even taught how to fish in the course of business. Then, he might start his own fishing business across the lake, or simply keep working for the original employer, who splits the fish with him evenly. This is because they now contribute the exact same amount of work, and are thus partners rather than employer and employee. And if the new partner does feel like he is getting the short end of the stick, he still has the skills to strike out on his own as previously mentioned.

Now, don’t be fooled. This is an analogy deliberately ignoring many potential variables. But keep in mind that, given a reasonably functional moral framework, this is how it would unfold in most cases. Now, let’s compare this to socialism.

Socialism is one man who has the ability to fish, and another does not. A third man approaches, and demands that the man with fish contribute to the poor man as well as anyone else who needs it. The fisherman objects, but the two outnumber him, and they proclaim that he has to turn over any excessive amounts of fish that he acquires. So, the fisherman reduces his workload, as any fish he gains by spending more time fishing is lost anyways, and gains him nothing. Additionally, he cannot grow his enterprise, as no one is willing to work for him when they can simply be handed the fruits of his labor for free. Meanwhile, the poor man is provided a slowly dwindling supply of fish, and spends his days performing tasks that do not necessarily provide value to people beyond himself. Perhaps he is able to survive indefinitely on the small supply of fish, or perhaps he eventually starves due to the low supply and inability to acquire fish for himself. Either way, the only person who might thrive in this situation is the third man who arranged the deal, as he is always able to take however much he needs from the fish tax before whatever remains is forwarded to the poor.

To again preempt some objections to this, I would like to point out that a socialist economy almost requires a greedy, unscrupulous population. If you already had a wealthy population supporting the poor out of the goodness of their hearts, you would not require force to make them do so. I honestly believe the analogy is already a bit generous, as another common occurrence is the wealthy buying off the third party collecting the excess product to make things easier for them and harder for the poor. But that’s getting off track.

While these examples are already stretching the fishing analogy to it’s breaking point, I think it represents the two schools of thought rather well. Capitalism is premised on cooperation, while socialism on coercion.

Now, I already foresee some socialists in the comment section saying things like “Socialism isn’t coercion! It’s democratic ownership of the means of production!”

Yes, precisely. The people in my socialist example asserted their right to the products of one man’s fishing. His “means of production” was “democratically” owned. A means of production does not simply come from nowhere, someone usually makes it, or discovers and maintains it. In the capitalist example, the fisherman was allowed to own the fruit of his labor, and it allowed him to expand his industry and create more opportunity to his community by extension. If you wish to have a person own something, such as the means of production, they either must create that thing producing value, or they must purchase it from someone willing to sell it to them. I’m not against workers owning stock in their own company, starting their own companies, or even pooling their funds to purchase their own factories so they can run them as they see fit. I’m against people forcefully taking something that does not belong to them because they are not satisfied with what they already have. Because that’s socialism, and it has been repeatedly shown to kill economies.

Now, let’s go deeper into the topic of ownership.

The Concept of Ownership

See, here’s the thing with ownership… it’s not an arbitrary thing. It has a profound effect on people’s behavior. I’ve worked as a software developer for multiple years now, and there is an idea of ownership in regards to different projects. Most enterprise software will have multiple people working on it off and on over its lifetime, but in order to keep it on track, there is a project owner. This is the person who knows the project most thoroughly and takes responsibility for its success as well as its shortcomings. They will usually do the most work on that project, or be in charge of directing the effort of other developers working on that project.

Note that projects should ALWAYS have an owner. The owner might change as employment situations change, but a project without an owner is rudderless, directionless… bug fixes are less consistent, available support and documentation becomes sparse. Projects will die without a properly defined owner. Why? Because an owner will make sure that things get taken care of. If you are just some guy brought in to fix some bug, that is all you will do. If you are the project owner, you will fix the bug, but also look for ways to improve the code so similar bugs are less likely to occur, so future changes can be made easier and more efficiently, while updating documentation to make sure future edits will be more informed on what was done… basically, a project owner actually cares what happens to the project. They aren’t blindly following orders to collect a paycheck. If they don’t go above and beyond in this fashion, it’s the same as if the project had no owner. Eventually, it will become deprecated and die out.

Really think about that in the context of all property. Who takes care of your car? You do. You are the one who pays a mechanic to perform maintenance; he’s not going to be breaking down the door to fix your car unless you take the initiative to bring the car in and pay him. Who cleans your house or apartment? Hopefully you do, because asking a stranger to come help clean your living quarters will get you some puzzled looks. Who takes care of you? Either your parents, who in the eyes of the law have a recognized authority(a form of ownership, if you think about it) over you, or yourself if you are an adult, and thus having ownership over yourself. The idea of ownership is integral to the idea of responsibility, and the idea of responsibility is what keeps our society from devolving into complete disarray.

Oh, and don’t bother coming at me with the personal vs. private distinction when it comes to seizing things. In my framework of responsibility, it changes nothing. An individual owning a factory will behave very differently from a group of workers who were simply handed the factory. Groups behave drastically different to individuals, and this is why mob mentality can effectively erase a person’s sense of individual responsibility for their actions. You could extend this to explain why decisions reached by a heterogeneous committee are generally inferior to decisions reached by a leader(or a leader with well informed advisors) with principles and a vision, but I digress…

So what does all of this have to do with money? So far, we have only talked about property. Well, you can own money too, right? The question then becomes: What is the true nature of currency?

The Essence of Currency

Currency, as I see it, is potential energy. It is feedback on contributions to society, and is a representation of abstract value. The only value it holds is the value of the services or goods it can be exchanged for; if every single person but one vanished from the world, or if all humans were completely separated from each other with no method to interact with each other whatsoever, all currency would immediately be entirely worthless. Society is a prerequisite for money to even exist.

There was a world before money. Additionally, people were, and some today currently are, able to survive without any assistance from other people. You could get a piece of remote land, build your own house, grow your own food, and keep to yourself. It would likely not be as comfortable a life as what most people in the modern world enjoy now, but it is absolutely possible. So, if you keep this in mind, you may realize that money is strictly something used to interact with the available resources of other people.

If you have money, it means you have power over society that was made available to you with society’s permission. If you give someone fifty bucks and ask them to do something, they will very likely do it if it won’t cost them more than the value of those fifty bucks. Usually, arrangements are more complicated and nuanced than that, with businesses offering specific things for specific amounts of money, but the fundamental idea that money can and will cause people to do things for you does not change. Meanwhile, you can do things to get people to hand over their money, which for most people takes the shape of working a standard job for an employer, but also includes starting a business to offer something to society that people determine is worth the requested cost.

So, while I see money as potential energy, another way of looking at it is as a feedback system. If you earn a lot of money, that means you are providing a lot of value to other people, and thus can require a substantial amount of goods and services in return. If you earn very little, that means you are not providing much value to other people, and have less power to require goods and services. And to those who advocate for a cashless society, or at least believe that such a society is inevitable through something like total automation, all I can say is you need to replace this feedback mechanism somehow; humans are notorious for their greed, and feelings of entitlement will only increase if everything is free. But until that future looks remotely possible, let’s at least presume we still require people to contribute to the economy. If people have no measurement for their contributions, people stop contributing in intelligent ways, and chains of productions can suffer massive surges or devastating bottlenecks. In a kind of comical way, riding a bike while blindfolded is like a society without money. Sure, you can absolutely do it in theory, but you better have some other way to orient yourself if you want to avoid ending up in a ditch.

I can already detect some people suggesting things besides currency be used to manage feedback for contributions. Two things as a prospective response to these potential ideas. One, if it is an abstract point system of any kind, it is fundamentally the same as money. And two, attempts to encourage certain behaviors to solve a problem can have unintended side effects. A perfect example of this is the Cobra Effect. Bounties were placed on cobras to cut down on the population, where every cobra tail provided could be exchanged for a sum. What did people do? They started breeding cobras to cut off their tails to make money. The result was more cobras, not less.

Go ahead, argue that example too if you wish. But the point is that people naturally look for ways to maximize reward and minimize cost. Trying to arbitrarily create demand or supply in the market does not always end well.

Then How Do We Properly Use Money?

As I’ve just explained, money is not arbitrary, nor is property. There is a proper way to use it, and an improper way. The simple answer is to live within your means and keep proper tabs of where your money is going, same as a responsible property owner would do with his belongings. Additionally, when it comes to gaining money, all you need to do is provide a valuable good or service to other people. If it is truly needed and desired, people will be sure to fund your activities.

Now, there is a kind of “momentum” effect at play. The more money you gather, the more power you have over other people. Meaning, you can expand your influence and gain access to greater opportunities and employ more people to increase output and efficiency. This is why we typically have a small number of extremely rich people, and why it seems to stay that way forever. But note that the rules do not fundamentally change. If they stop providing for their fellow man in some fashion, their income will dry up. Only corruption of the highest order can keep them wealthy indefinitely, and that is much more difficult nowadays with whistleblowers and journalists incentivized to annihilate the reputations of those who take part in sketchy dealings. And while it can and will take a while, even the poorest individual can potentially rise to a wealthier status if they make smart and consistent contributions.

Oddly enough, those who seek to serve will provide value and amass wealth. Those who seek only to be served will hemorrhage money and end up a debt slave. Rather counter intuitive, and yet very well supported by evidence. It follows a very apt Christian principle; those who are responsible with the small things will be given greater responsibility and greater power alongside it, while those who are not responsible with even the small things will lose that tiny amount of authority they actually had. To those who believe that this entire game is in fact rigged and the little people can’t get ahead, consider the following.

Dave Ramsey was a millionaire before he was 26. He went bankrupt due to borrowing more money than he should have. But after that, he came back and is now a multi millionaire. To suggest that one can’t build wealth up from having nothing is an utter falsehood, as Dave Ramsey did exactly that, and now he runs a show explaining how in great detail and length.

He also promoted a book written by Chris Hogan, Everyday Millionaires, which contains statistics produced by an outside research firm. They interviewed ten thousand millionaires, and found many common characteristics between them that line up with the principles I have been trying to explain, and ones which Ramsey touts in pretty much every single show he runs.

• 79% of millionaires received no inheritance, meaning they were not simply handed their wealth.

• 5% received less than $100,000

• Most that received an inheritance greater than $100,000 received it after they were already millionaires.

• There were millionaires of every race, sex, background, and region. In other words, their status was not caused by some inherent privilege afforded to a group.

• Out of ten millionaires, seven went to public colleges, one went to a community college, one didn’t go to college, and only one went to a prestigious college.

• Most millionaires keep debt low to nonexistent. In other words, the ability to obtain loans does not make one a millionaire.

• 97% of millionaires interviewed, when asked if they were in control of their own destiny, said yes. Polls of the general public return 54%.

See… when it comes to money, it’s usually less important exactly how much you make. It’s definitely important to have a steady income, but it’s not the only factor that determines financial success. What’s more important is how you handle your money. Being in debt, whether credit cards or car loans, drains your money. If you live within your means and only buy what you can afford to buy, you will have a much easier time building meaningful wealth. It’s about taking personal responsibility for your situation, and not foisting that onto someone else.

Why The Long-Winded Explanation?

I’ve been meaning to write this blog for a long time, and it already feels much longer than it should be. But I want to really nail it into people’s heads; the victimhood most people feel is undeserved. Another person’s success, by it’s simple existence, has not prevented your success. Barring the most extreme of examples, you are the master of your own fate, and thinking otherwise will keep you perpetually trapped in your own mental prison where you come to bizarre, untenable conclusions on how to fix this world that dared not give you everything you want. Not to mention, if the world really did deal you an unwinnable hand, there are no shortage of good Samaritans willing to help you out. But this victimhood mindset, in my opinion, is no better evidenced than one part of the ignition for finally writing this blog, a post by our fellow Minds user, Kevskewl.

From there, a question arises: if God initially gave the entire earth to mankind to own in common, then how can you ever have individual property? Or, to borrow a line from Locke, since the earth is given to mankind in common, “it seems to some a very great difficulty, how any one should ever come to have a property in any thing.” The correct answer to this question, reached by Proudhon but not Locke, is that the only way to move from universal common ownership to individual private ownership is through theft. When an individual appropriates pieces of the earth (e.g. land) out of the commons and into private ownership, that individual steals from everyone else. Everyone else’s ownership share in that piece of the earth is taken from them, violently and without their consent.

-Kevskewl

Wow. A textbook example of cherry picking! Let’s dive into this a bit, though I will quickly say this; I have nothing against Kevskewl. I simply think he is completely wrong in his assertion on this subject.

Yes, under Christian philosophy, God did give the entire earth to mankind to use as they saw fit. But do you know who this was at the time, specifically? Adam and Eve. Two, very specific, individuals. That’s rather important. He didn’t give the earth to several already existing groups of people for common use, he gave it to two people who had an already established authority structure to dispel any ambiguity on ownership. Meaning, those two people literally owned the earth, and each gave sections of it as inheritance to their descendants. By simple virtue of owning a piece of land, they didn’t steal it from anyone; God gave it to them, and they gave it to others, who managed it however they saw fit. After this, did some people steal land from others unlawfully? Absolutely, and as long as that’s not outside the statute of limitations, we can make amends for such criminal activity. Would some people contest that God doesn’t exist, and thus both mine and Kevskewl’s analogies are forfeit? I’m sure some people would take that route. But to argue that property is theft under this vein of pseudo-Christian thought is fallacious at it’s very core. It takes a part of Christian philosophy and twists it very deliberately to arrive at a predetermined conclusion while ignoring other parts of the Christian worldview that are inconvenient. That’s the very definition of cherry picking.

Not to mention... there is such a thing as Abandonment in reference to property. If a piece of property is not recorded as owned by anyone, or the owner no longer maintains or even uses it, it passes back into the public domain and is up for grabs to the first person to lay claim to it. All the details surrounding this are well beyond the scope of this blog, as well as my expertise, but I thought it worth mentioning given the fact that everything must be actively owned by someone was being implicitly assumed here.

Now, from the video link provided under this post as additional context to this assertion, this specific line stood out to me:

Taxation is a demand placed on an individual by the group, while property is a demand placed on the group by the individual.

This one quote, even in the full context of the short video which I encourage you go watch for yourself so you know I’m not misrepresenting it, shows exactly why socialists can’t succeed in a capitalist system. They equate someone’s success as an affront to them. They suggest that actively taking property from an individual is merely the other side of that person having that property in the first place. These property holders weren’t stealing from people(if they were, put them in jail), they weren’t hurting people(if they were, put them in jail), they weren’t scamming people(if they were, put them in jail)… they simply HAD property that they acquired and monetized. In fact, most people who are rich have taken part in improving people’s lives by creating goods or services to further build up the economy. They do the exact opposite of taking advantage of people, which is why I find it so astounding that people constantly vilify the wealthy by virtue of their success alone! 

This is not a love for the poor, and thus a desire to help them, it’s a very visceral hatred for the rich. And if you truly hate the rich(to take a paraphrased idea from Dave Ramsey), it is nigh impossible to become rich, as deep down you don’t want to end up hating yourself. That self-imposed, subconscious restriction is the single biggest reason why so many otherwise talented and capable people will never discover their true potential, and I find that thought both incredibly sad and overwhelmingly infuriating.

Some Parting Thoughts

Overall, this framing of property as inherently abusive is not an attempt to make a better system or improve lives. This is the mindset of people who are merely ENVIOUS of people more successful than them. This is the female actor who, while making hundreds of thousands, is still angry that another male actor makes millions. This is the YouTuber who, despite having almost two hundred thousand subscribers, is still angry that Pewdiepie has multiple millions of subscribers. This is the socialist(let's use Bernie Sanders as the example for this one) who, while fancying themselves an economic expert, is angry that people they consider less enlightened than them has built up wealth over time by hard work and not making excuses for their situation. It’s not altruism for the downtrodden, it’s jealousy.

I will end this by being completely frank. Socialists DEMAND they be given slaves. This is not hyperbolic, it is an accurate description of what they want. After all, money represents social value, potential energy that can be released to coerce action on the part of other people. That is what it means when they ask for money; they want people to do things for them, while they are not required to do things for other people in return. Meanwhile, Capitalists DEMAND they be allowed to serve their fellow man however they see fit, and collect the value of those favors over time to secure their own future.

This is a dichotomous choice. Either people can own things, or they can't. Any in between requires all kinds of exceptions and mental gymnastics. Pick one or the other, I know which one I’ve picked.

SOURCES:

Kevskewl’s post

Property is theft video

Conversation on ownership of software(it’s rather informal, and not necessarily licensing related)

Dave Ramsey, Everyday Millionaires

The Cobra Effect