VIII. You shall not steal.
There is no reason to mince words. In order to steal, you have to take something that belongs to someone else. In order to belong to someone else, there has to first be a state of ownership. So the person who holds the property has to have rights to that property. Without those rights, there is no theft.
Some Christians would try to remark that all property belongs to God and we are merely stewards of that property.
Fair enough. Still concerning is that those Christians think that is a response to the idea of property rights. Whether we have sole ownership of the property we hold, or whether God holds the rights and grants stewardship to us, the issue for humanity is no different. God’s command is simply not to steal. There is no exception for theft of things we have determined aren’t really owned by us.
Ultimately, the argument between stewardship and ownership is just a deflection. God denies the ability to take things that don’t belong to us. If we don’t own it, or God hasn’t bestowed stewardship for it over us, the difference is irrelevant. We don’t have rights to it. Your rights end where the ownership or stewardship of others begins.
Some democratic socialists have taken to trying to separate personal property from business property. Again, this is mincing words. If you accumulate enough personal property and wanted to voluntarily exchange that property in a way that someone else could benefit from, they now would assume you cannot own that property. It would go from a private piece of property to a productive piece of property. They would restrict your ability to choose what to do with your own property.
This is a devastatingly overcomplicated way of trying to distract you from the fact that a person owns what they earn from their produce. If I save money, and by soil, then plant vegetables, grow the vegetables, and sell the vegetables for money, it is still my property until I willingly part with it for money. God finds the idea of property to be an ideal and a reward of hard work and production, and any claim on that property from someone who did not work for it is theft.
Terms like wage slave are ridiculous on their face. Hiring someone to help with my garden is a voluntary exchange of my money for their help. A business owner seeking some assistance will offer a job. Applicants willingly participate in requesting the job and if offered, have the opportunity to decline if the offered wages are too low. Should they accept the work, the now employee has willingly chosen a better situation for the employee. That is all that really matters. Trying to regulate that choice out of the market through political majority isn’t freedom, and it violates the very tenet of God’s authority.
If people choose to save, and reinvest or make purchases of productive goods to enable more wealth production, none of that is the business of anyone else.
Perhaps this is the reason that socialism and communism seek so fervently to erase God from society and embrace atheism. They also require political force to be implemented, because they are by nature violent, and states hold a monopoly on violence.
In a recent debate, Ben Burgis, author of “Cancelling Comedians While the World Burns: A Critique of the Contemporary Left,” took on Gene Epstein in a SOHO Forum debate with the debate motion that “Socialism is preferable to capitalism as an economic system that promotes freedom, equality, and prosperity.” Ben is a self-labeled democratic socialist and Gene, certainly more of a free market proponent, and he circled around an area of concern which probably deserves a debate in itself. Honestly, the 3 points of promotion could all be debated separately, but the point I’d like to emphasize is freedom.
Mr. Burgis is adamant that if an idea wins at the ballot box, that is proof that it is majority held. Even if true, a 51% majority holding at the ballot box still leaves a 49% minority who are now restricted in their freedoms. That shouldn’t be ideal in terms of maximizing freedom. However, it isn’t clear that any single idea wins at the ballot box. People are not given single-issue, up or down, votes at the ballot box. They are provided a mix of candidates with weird conglomerations of ideas and policies mingled together.
Where choice is really felt, and the vote of an individual is manifested, is actually in the market. Where the free exchange of goods, services, and ideas is allowed to take place unhindered by regulation. Nothing stops a union from opening their own factory and giving ownership to the laborers and allowing it to compete in the open market. If it is more effective, it will last, and it would be able to pay better wages and drive competitors who did not adopt that model from their industry.
That is what scares Burgis most, however. In the actual market of goods and services, his ideas of reallocating wealth and destroying the capitalist class meet with reality, and they fail every time. We have no historical example of the collective ownership of good prevailing in an open market. Only when forced from the state, and implemented with the coercive threat of violence, have they ever been practiced, and the end result is dismal.
The arbiter of that reality is God. He authored it. His command to not steal fundamentally promotes the idea of property and that includes the right to use that property for purposes the owner deems appropriate.
I currently own land. If I want to merely use it for private entertainment and for my children to play, that is my prerogative. However, if I want to own some chickens for eggs, and grow a garden for vegetables, that is also my fundamental right of my property. What if I were to grow extra for the purpose of sharing or exchanging for others?
At this point, my property has become productive and Ben thinks I lose rights to it?
Similarly, if my neighbor chooses to work extra hours in labor to earn more cash, and desires to exchange some of that cash for the eggs or vegetables on my property, does that make my property now a capital good that requires collective ownership? Am I allowed to participate in the exchange without Ben and his army of government agents showing up and claiming part ownership of my property that I saved and invested in?
Scaling up the level of production of my eggs or vegetables is irrelevant to the fundamental right of ownership that is assumed in God’s command to not steal. Property rights don’t end because I double my chickens. If the Douglas homesteading operation starts producing 1000 eggs a month and 300 cucumbers, the willingness of others to purchase my produce does not negate my rights to that property. They also allow for specialization, which means my neighbor, a general contractor, can focus more time and effort into the building and repairing of homes, and I can grow produce and collect eggs.
Now any government fix should look disgustingly antithetical to this command. Taxes are, in their very nature, an acquisition of the fruits of your labor against your will. The labor you participate in is the use of your skills, effort, or property to earn payment and the payment is now your property for that voluntary exchange. Taking your money is by nature the declaration of the government that they are part owner of your property.
Folks like Ben Burgis see no issue with this concept, and instead want to control and weaponize it against their ideological foes.
Those enemies include anyone who holds a faith in God, and trusts His Word as the Truth. We are called to use what we have to help others, but those are individual mandates. Voting to force others into helping with what they have is not an authority we have been granted by God, and therefore is not an authority we have to delegate to a representative.
The tyranny of the majority does not render the command not to steal moot. I don’t care if you win at the ballot box. The moral imperative is that we protect the rights of the minority from the imposed will of the majority.
With all that said, Mr. Epstein won the debate, thankfully. Offering a glimmer of hope that when singling out the issue of socialism, the majority are still not amenable. Ben Burgis is a formidable opponent, though, and his book is a unique aspect of attacking the version of leftism that we all find detestable, from the perspective of the left. I can’t read it yet, as it is in pre-release, but sources I trust say it raises some great arguments and it is on my list. Put it on yours as well. Worst case is that we need to understand how a socialist thinks, and although I think Ben is wrong, he is at least intelligent and kind. Someone worth talking to.
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