Some Seattle city council members want to legalize theft when the thief is thereby meeting an “immediate basic need.”
A KOMO News reporter elaborates: “If someone . . . steals power tools with the intent of reselling them online in order to pay for a basic need like food or rent, the city of Seattle may be OK with that.”
This “principle” discards the principle that individuals have rights, including property rights, which it is wrong to violate by, for example, stealing. With the principle discarded, no line can be drawn to limit the amount of stealing one may do or the means of doing so. The needs of the person being robbed are somehow deemed irrelevant.
The Seattle plan might have spared Hugo’s Jean Valjean decades of being pursued by Javert. But the injustice there wasn’t that Valjean was punished for stealing a loaf of bread but that his punishment — 19 years as a galley slave — was so disproportionate.
Food is a continuing cost. Rent is. The immediacy keeps recurring. What if you have a $2,500 monthly rent?
Well, just gotta steal lots of power tools, and do so regularly. According to the babblers on the Seattle city council, “need” trumps the rights and lives of the innocent. So it’s okay to terrify somebody in a dark alley and grab their stuff even if the victim has an immediate basic need to be left alone.
Seattle has an immediate basic need for a new government that respects lives and property. Until then, let’s hope the “city limit” signs are well marked.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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5 replies on “Needed Theft”
Taking to meet one’s immediate need an item to “sell” to another is a perfect oxymoron. Trespass of a person’s property right in order to gain the ability to transfer it for value so as to make it another’s property is an impossibility. In such a system there is no property right and therefore no value to any good or possession, the market for exchange will fail and with it the entire economic system with the only means for protection being the direct threat or application of overwhelming force.
This is not even a hopeful utopia, it is pure anarchy where quite literally everyone for themselves, no rules, no peace and no security. The most valuable commodity will shortly become ammunition which will buy anything, until it is used against the “seller” do dispossess them of the fruits of the trade.
No thank you!
I can’t for this to happen in Seattle! Let the free-for-all begin and may the commotion, riots, anarchy, and destruction be so great as to raze the city to the ground, destroy the wicked utterly, and leave a smoking pile of ashes, rubble, and weeping and wailing. That’s the final judgement of the wicked.
Then maybe some common sense will rise out of the dung heap and build something worthy that might last.
I’m curious to see what happens when some thief brakes into one of those council member’s house. I don’t think they would be very “forgiving”.
What a bunch of nuts.
Amazing how far utter lack of any common sense has fallen. I do not see how that city, or any like it, can continue to function in any way.
Now with the direction the election seems to be headed we can look forward to bailing them out. You know, how they deem it essential for the city to continue functioning.
What if I shoot someone that “needed” shooting?