On Property vs Lives

Table of Contents

Lives are more important than property

Answer: that depends

I’ve been seeing this argument bandied about in the last few months regarding BLM, Kyle Rittenhouse, and the “protests” (riots) that have been happening in well over six years. Frankly, I’m dumbfounded that this is even a thing. People spend 40 hours of their life a week doing something for someone else, exchanging labor for compensation. Twice of those weeks, they get a paycheck that has people sticking their fingers in it to get their slice. The government wants their social security, payroll taxes, income taxes, and Medicare and Medicaid programs. Then the state wants their piece - property taxes, school taxes, licenses, fees. If you went through a shitty marriage, you have child support or alimony. Then another chunk goes out to living expenses, like utility bills - water, electricity, gas - garbage collection, rent, mortgage, HOA fees; things you can’t avoid paying to have a bare minimum existence.

After all of those things are chopped out, you then get your chunk. Maybe you need a repair you have been delaying for months. Perhaps you need to go to the doctor to get a weird lump checked out that you’ve been scared to hear the truth. You get your food, your subscriptions to fun things like Netflix, your internet access, and periodic stuff like furniture, a knick-knack, a new tool, a game, a book, or something that you don’t need but may want. Or you like to live a more hedonistic life and get some booze or a little something-something to get stoned for a bit.

Now, we’ve firmly established ourselves as what is known as “Property Owners.” We exchange labor for stuff. Our time, which makes up our lives, is to get something honestly.

What happens when some a-hole determines that they are entitled to that stuff, which you exchanged for your time? What if some a-hole determines that they should be able to light it on fire because other people like you (read: people they don’t like) don’t deserve it?

In defense of property

To boil it down, life is important. When a person wants to get stoned for 4 hours but can’t bother to trade his time for compensation and would instead take from another, that position gets significantly diminished; to put a point on it, it has less value in an abstract sense. Commies always talk about entitlement to the fruits of their labor, but they mean the “collective labor.” Your ass didn’t write 20, 000 lines of code, working 70 hours to get it done before the deadline… you flipped burgers for the 20 hours you got (and whined was too much) this week.

Considerably more, in the aforementioned-government slice of the pie - they are already taking from that chunk; it’s spread over a wider group of people. They weren’t content with that (it is kinda fractional) - they had to go to the source.

Freedom is property

I think the last bit on this is that, in western countries, there is a distinction between Private Property versus Public Property. When people want to eliminate private property, they still think they’ll keep their guitar as a pittance in the starry-eyed view of someone else’s house.

Socialism only works until you run out of someone else’s money - or in the case of killing in the name of looting, it only works until people try to stop you from taking other people’s stuff.