Economics and Theft

With all the occupy Wall Street hub bub recently, it’s becoming clear that many people associate theft with the concept of capitalism. If there are rich fat men in the 1% hoarding all the wealth away from the 99%, it’s because they stole it. Now it’s only fair that they give it back to the rest of us, they argue.

That idea sounds great and warm and fuzzy and all, right up until the point when you actually think about it. You see, free market capitalism is antithetical to theft and coercion. It promotes the individual ownership of property and the voluntary free-trade between willing participants. Capitalism is:

an economic system in which investment in and ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange of wealth is made and maintained chiefly by private individuals or corporations, especially as contrasted to cooperatively or state-owned means of wealth.

And, ironically, the economic system that these protesters promote, namely socialism, is synonymous with theft and coercion. While the definition is benign enough:

a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole.

The implication is that no matter who produced the capital, improved the land, did the work, their production is owned by the state to be taken and redistributed according to the will of the bureaucrats.

Both capitalism and socialism are ways of redistributing wealth, but only one is synonymous with theft and that one’s not being targeted by the Occupy Wall St. crowd.