No, that would be immoral. But the immorality would be on the people not on the sale.
To put it another way, a serial killer who kills ten people because he enjoys killing people isn’t more moral than a contract killer who kills ten people because he was paid to kill him.
All sales involve people. All capitalism does, too. So it’s a distinction without difference to me.
I don’t see the relevance of the analogy.
You do realise when I spoke about stolen goods, I wasn’t making an analogy? That’s literally what capitalism is based on, trade in ultimately stolen goods.
Then we’re in a disagreement.
Let’s say I learn to cook. I take my savings and buy a restaurant. I go to the grocery store and buy ingredients. I take them to my restaurant and prepare meals. I then sell the meals to customers.
Who did I steal from?
How were your cooking lessons funded? Generational wealth? Or a government student loan?
Did you build your restaurant on an island you raised from the sea yourself?
Do you vet all your customers as to how they earned the money they pay you for their meals?
As I stated above, there is a tendency for some American’s to view Capitalism as a natural force, something good, inevitable. When they have that as their default mindset, they are blind to any alternative, either as describing now, or history. I would say that especially Americans - some of them - embrace Capitalism with a religious fervor.
For them it’s the Alpha and Omega. The cause and effect, the end of history.
Okay, you seem to have a broader definition of stealing than most people do. So let’s approach this from the opposite direction. Can you give an example of a economic transaction that you don’t consider to be trade in ultimately stolen goods?
Sure - a Native American sells me a basket made from reeds they’ve collected from the common land of their traditional area.
Or
An Icelandic farmer sells me some cheese made from sheep’s milk from sheep kept on common pastures.
Or
I buy fish fresh off the net at my local fisher’s market.
Or
I go to a local pop-up restaurant made out of a recycled shipping container, where a guy, taught to cook by his grandmother, makes me a meal of foraged greens and wild-caught venison.
(the second two being things I’ve actually done in the last 2 years)
Serious question: how far back do you go? If, fifteen hundred years ago, that Native American’s ancestors drove off the previous dwellers on that land, does this comprise trading in stolen goods? What if it happened ten thousand years ago? What if, eight hundred years ago, one brother murdered another in order to be recognized as the tribal elder in a way that impact usage-rights for the land?
It may be that you think about this stuff on a continuum. That’s how I tend to think about it: that the more distant the theft occurred, the less important it is. A theft that occurred last week is more significant than one that occurred ten years ago, which is more important than one that involved your parents and mine, which is more important than one that occurred in the nineteenth century, and so on.
At some point, the importance of these thefts diminishes into irrelevance: I’m not concerned about the history of theft that happened more than 500 years ago, no matter how great.
Is that how you’re thinking about it? If not, how do you evaluate old thefts?
I think about it to some extent as you do.
Another factor is whether the thieves are still oppressing their victims today (or in living memory, as with the case of much colonialism)
So Saxons don’t really have a valid case with Normans. The Irish, on the other hand…
Capitalist robber-barons are mostly in that still-oppressing category for me.
Definitely living memory is huge.
There are some cases where importance extends beyond living memory of the theft. In the US, I think slavery reparations are still reasonable: although there’s nobody who experienced, or whose parents experienced, chattel slavery who’s alive today (as near as I can find), the effects of this atrocity were so great that they passed down generationally.
To the extent that generational wealth is founded on this sort of injustice, its results remain unjust.
Which ones? Andrew Carnegie, or Elon Musk?
Yes…
Speaking of which, I’ve been meaning to apologize. I think we got this Elon Musk that used to belong to you, and I’m really sorry we took it. Can we send it back?
But, thats not what you said.
This thread is about capitalism. Not barter
I provided lots of cites that the Romans were capitalists. You ignored them, since they didnt use an secret magic word, then tried to hijack the thread.
Oh, please dont throw me in that briar patch!
Wait a second. I bought the food I’m serving and the restaurant I’m serving it from. This other guy “recycled” his restaurant and “foraged” the food. I see nothing there about him paying.
So why am I the guy who’s trading in stolen goods?
This was why I asked about the origin of your restaurant. I’m assuming, absent any other origin, that you bought it on the real estate market i.e. the property market.
And you know what I think about property.
And I don’t know why you’re putting scare quotes around recycling and foraging. Neither of those is stealing.
Do you think that shipping container just appeared by magic one day? Somebody manufactured it and somebody paid for it. And your restaurateur came along and saw it and decided to take it without paying for it. That’s called stealing not recycling.
Suppose this guy put some work into this shipping container and turned it into a restaurant. And I saw his restaurant looked nice. Realizing that it would be wrong for me to buy it on the real estate market, I just went in one night at three in the morning with a truck and a tow cable and hauled it away. But I wasn’t stealing it; I was recycling it into my restaurant.
Now the foraging. Those greens you mentioned had to be on a piece of land. Did somebody own that property? Or was it property belonging to the community? But this guy figured he could go on to this land that didn’t belong to him and take stuff and sell it. Can anyone do that? Can I go on to some random piece of land, cut down a few trees, and sell the firewood I foraged. Or do I have to be a Native American or an Icelandic farmer for that to be okay?
I’ll give you a tip. If you ever encounter any Native Americans, you might want to stay off this subject. Otherwise you might find they have a different view than you do on the morality of going into somebody else’s land and claiming whatever you like without paying for it.
…and then someone abandoned it. Threw it away, except that’s not how it works for shipping containers. There was a rash of this in the pandemic years.
It was no more stealing than picking up a piece of litter is stealing.
Yes.
Tell me you don’t know how the Commons works without telling me you don’t know how the Commons works.
Yes. Or, at least, certain things in certain commonly agreed ways.
Random? No. But that’s not how wild foraging works.
No, the particular forager in this case was as White European as they come.
Since that’s not at all what I’ve advocated doing, me and Native Americans should be just fine, I guess.
175 years ago Marx contemplated the whole foraging thing, in that case dead trees desperately needed for firewood, and useless for anything else. IIRC he considered the wood “alms of nature,” customary for poor people for the taking.
Today nothing is free. A few blocks from where I live, over a dozen nurses went off their shift this morning to find their car windows smashed and any valuables taken. The lot is roadblocked with an entrance scanner, and the nurses have to pay a monthly parking fee (no free alternative is nearby). Yet that fee profit was not in the least skimmed to protect their cars.
This is precisely why inclosure was one of the foundational practices of capitalism - taking away a long-standing right of access to a common resource and commoditizing it.
So the owner threw away the shipping container. Except that’s not how it works for shipping containers. I guess that means the owner didn’t throw away the shipping container.
I know how tragedy of the commons works.