I have an economics teacher that made this claim in class yesterday. I wanted to know other people’s thoughts about it.
Lol from who? The fucking predatory banks? Fuck debt, its what rich people use to keep us in servitude. School costs absurd amounts because of this shit.
No. A more educated population is better in every way.
But, assuming that this is in the US, one of the major parties relies on keeping people uneducated, so they don’t want people to pursue higher education. And certainly do not support cancelling student debt.
Im not sure where they’re referring to, but it’s the same, or similar at least, in the U.K.
That’s how they got Brexit and they’re pushing us to be right wing.
No.
Stealing from who? It’s a social program, if society has deemed it necessary and the bourgeoisie allows it then it is simply spending.
If instead of loans, education was paid through taxes, would that still be stealing?
I’m inclined to believe your economics teacher would say taxation is theft, and can be ignored. Using taxpayer money to improve society is not “theft”, it’s the social contract.
I had a university lecturer who claimed that climate change was racist “because Bangladeshi women can’t swim”
Idk how some people end up being able to teach sometimes
At a public awareness March in my country a speaker claimed COVID was racist because it disproportionately killed indigenous peoples.
You could argue that is correlation, where the cause was actually being unvaccinated. This was an antivax march, so obviously it was the government’s fault, not being unvaccinated.
All I could think was: Aliens don’t wear hats on Tuesdays because Tuna Helper is in Retrograde
The irony of them making a racial and gendered generalization on swimming skills lmao.
It’s always bothered me when people will blame a phenomenon and call it racist, when the systematic racism lies in our society and its response to the phenomenon. Climate change isn’t consciously choosing to target minorities, but societies are choosing not to support the minority groups disproportionately affected by it.
I’d bet a dollar it was a comment on the disparate impact of climate change on women and people of color, using Bangladeshi women being statistically less likely to know how to swim as an example. But sure, climate change is racist because Bangladeshi women can’t swim, that’s a much more juicy soundbite.
Bangladesh is a very populous country that lies almost entirely at sea level, and the Ganga and Brahmaputra flood at least once a year. The problem isn’t not being able to swim in calm water. The best swimmer in the world would still die if he got caught in one of those currents.
No.
It’s the same answer to “if you give someone a gift, did they steal from you?” or “is a discount stealing?”
All property is a social construct and is defined by law. So if the law says debt is no longer valid, then the loan agreements cease to be property and there is no stealing it.
That’s like saying if there was no law against theft I could drive away with your car, and that’s not stealing. I don’t think your argument is very convincing.
If the law said my car is no longer my property, then driving away with it would cease to be stealing, correct. What is property without legal, government-backed title? There’s no way to formulate a definition, because without government and laws property has no meaning.
Property has existed before laws existed to enforce it. It was enforced with violence. Stealing is still stealing even if there’s no law against it.
And if there was a disagreement about whose property was who’s? With no laws to settle it, it would just be determined by who grabs said property and runs off with it first. That’s indistinguishable from a free-for-all.
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Eh, maybe. Back during feudalism, emancipation of serfs was also considered theft from the nobles who owned the land (and thus the serfs who worked it).
Sometimes governments implemented programs to reimburse the nobles for losing “their” serfs, and sometimes not. Now that we’re a couple centuries removed from that drama, we generally accept that the destruction of feudalism was a good thing, regardless of whether it was theft.
Who cancelled it?
That’s what it comes down to.
If the person that took out the loan cancels it by some kind of fuckery, then you could likely call it stealing.
If it’s the entity that made the loan, obviously not.
If it’s an agent of the government, which is ultimately the expression of the collective people which defines what stealing is and isn’t, then it would depend on how it was achieved. If the agent of the government acted within the law as established at the time the loan was cancelled, then it can’t be stealing from a legal standpoint.
Now, is it ethical? That’s a different question. It could be seen as a form of theft, but I would argue that it is no more or less theft than taxes, fees for government services, interest, etc. If it is stealing, then pretty much every government enforced payments are theft to begin with, which includes the interest on those loans.
Stealing is when you take something from someone illegally. What you described, and what OP described, is not even close to that.
First, what was taken from who? Money from the government, let us suppose. But legally. And even if it were illegal, which it isn’t, what is the damage? Of course there is none. It’s still 100% moral.
Comically, this is such a mild example of the Prodigal Son. Didn’t folks learn this shit in Sunday School?
Ahhh, not all of us went to Sunday school lol. Those of us that did, didn’t all pay attention, and those that did didn’t all accept it and internalize it enough to reference.
Like, I went maybe three times? Then I bailed because it was a tad, well bullshit. Too much of it just didn’t scan.
With that, there’s a lot of room in the concept of theft, of stealing that goes beyond taking things illegally. Looking at it in the context of an economics class, it’s obviously meant to try the students thinking about things on a broad level, a way of breaking the box so that they can not just think outside it, but really abandon it so that new concepts can be explored fresh.
That’s the framework of my response.
Only by the rich people who are actually stealing from us. PPP loan forgiveness for their litany of fraudulent claims…
An actually civilized society would want its citizens educated. Does stealing matter in a world of barbarity for profit?
Don’t forget it’s not just a capitalistic money grab, but that an uneducated electorate is easier to control.
I think one way you can at least partially answer that is by asking whether college tuition has increased in price equally with how valuable a college tuition is.
The answer is no btw
