Robin Hood: Stealing from the Rich
Sunday January 15, 2006
If you were able to steal from money from rich people without hurting anyone in the process and without being detected, and then were to give the money to very poor people so that they could avoid starving, being sick, etc., would you do it? Which is the most ethical choice: to leave the money with the rich people who own it or give the money to the poor people who need it to survive?
That's perhaps a consequentialist way of looking at it - asking which choice has the best implications. We can also frame the question in a deontological manner: do you have an ethical duty to leave the money with it's owners (the rich) or do you have an ethical duty to help the poor who need money to survive? The answers here could be very different. A person could say that they would steal in order to achieve the better consequences, but that they don't actually have an ethical duty to steal. What would you do?
Read More:
Comments
I already ‘robin’ here in the UK and I read that a ‘gang’ of around thirty robins are working posh stores in Germany. They expropriate goods which are given to the poorest of Germans dirrectly, posh food mainly.
In my case, I only expropriate goods and cash from commercial organisations that are linked to usury charging banks. As this constitutes full time employment, I keep 50% of the value of the goods or cash for myself. The other 50% is donated to the worlds poorest people. Most has gone to a cause protecting orphaned and abandoned babies in Malawi.
Although I’ve achieved only a small fraction of what I intend, God willing, I’ll do much more.
I realise this is an atheist site (I love God above all things), but the topic came up on google I wanted to comment.
This from a right-wing, UK newspaper…
(For American readers, ASDA is just WalMart UK.)
By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 18th March 1997.
I have two friends who owe their survival to supermarkets. Lindsey roams the aisles, loading food not into her basket, but straight into her mouth. Carl rummages through the skips behind the stores. Both are out of work and can’t get benefits. Of the two, Lindsey is doing best. She is often thrown out of the store and occasionally roughed up, but has never been arrested. The supermarkets, she thinks, are too embarrassed to prosecute people who are obviously starving among the sceptred aisles.
Sometimes Carl still comes across open skips containing enough good food to keep him alive for months, were he able to transport it and store it. A couple of weeks ago, he found more than a tonne of cheese in one-pound packs, with a month to go on the sell-by date. The supermarkets, he says, suddenly decide that a line isn’t selling fast enough and clear it to release the shelf space. But most outlets now push their surplus produce into a sealed skip, where it is sprayed with chemicals and ground up. Unlike Lindsey, Carl has twice been prosecuted: taking waste food from skips amounts in law to theft.
Is this the supermarket of values we’ve heard so much about? It certainly seems rather odd that those who disparagingly use retailers’ jargon – off the peg ethics, pick and mix morality – to lament the decline in moral values are also among the first to leap to the superstores’ defence. Last week the Reverend John Papworth suggested that shoplifting from supermarkets was a “reallocation of resources” from stores “destroying the basic framework of vibrant communities”. The hiss of affronted virtue has yet to die down. One can’t help suspect that, much as our commentators disdain the supermarket of values, they rather approve of the values of supermarkets.
Whatever you make of Papworth’s prescription, there’s nothing wrong with his analysis. The values of supermarkets are characteristically shaky, frequently criminal. In East Africa, white growers contracted to British superstores are now stealing water allocated to some of the poorest and most vulnerable people on earth. The Ewasongiro River, on which the livelihood of tens of thousands of central Kenyans depends, has run dry as a result of illegal pumping. Starvation in central Kenya is now directly attributable to Britain’s consumption of unseasonal mange tout.
No sector interprets the notion of “planning gain” more liberally than the superstores. In theory, planning gain is the means by which developers can ameliorate the social and environmental impact of their projects. In practice, the supermarkets use it as legalised bribery. In return for planning permission, they’ll promise to build a tennis court on the other side of town, or even offer straight cash payments. In 1995, Safeway stretched the principle still further by promising the Western Isles Island Council £375,000 worth of sports facilities, if it REFUSED planning permission for the Co-op to build a rival store. Last week, schoolchildren in Merton, south London, decided to take Sainsbury’s to court for failing to build the amenities it had promised.
In a score of subtle ways, some legal, some not, superstores force us to carry the costs of their expansion. Between 1976 and 1989, 44,000 food shops closed down, with a massive net decline in both the quantity and quality of employment. Dodgy business rate holidays and a flat refusal to pay the environmental and infrastructural costs of freight haulage ensure that their profits are our loss.
The superstores’ expropriation from the commonweal amounts to a heist of unprecedented proportions. Lindsey and her friends can stuff their faces with crisps and caviar every day of the year and do nothing to redress the balance. Only when they are forced both to pay their own costs and to compete on equal terms with other retailers will the supermarkets start to give as much as they take.
There’s no question about what needs to be done. Planning permission for unbuilt out-of-town superstores must be cancelled; the taxation of road freight and aviation fuel should be massively increased; regional retail monopolies need to be investigated by the MMC. But the big stores are tremendously powerful. Their bosses are endowed with knighthoods, peerages and, for ASDA’s Chief Executive, a safe parliamentary seat. They can buy their way into favour and out of trouble. Lady Porter, the Tesco’s heiress, could pay her part of the £31 million fine imposed by the district auditor without blinking.
The government might not be able to stop them; but, by withdrawing our custom, we can. When you step into a superstore, you are faced with a choice of two crimes: joining the poor in stealing from the rich, or helping the rich to steal from the poor. Both are wrong but, even in the supermarket of values, one crime is surely more heinous than the other.
“If you were able to steal from money from rich people without hurting anyone in the process…”
Actually, I think that, in a minor way, stealing is inherently harmful (though not always physically).
It amazes me to no end how many web pages and links that you can go to and there be someone asking for help in paying their bills. Well Go figure! I too a sucker for thinking that there would be someone out there to listen to why my family and I are in the pickle that we are in. Not because of serious spending but, because of health issues or family members passing on and so forth. It is unclear to me how long this country is going to allow the average middle class and lower middle class to suffer with high gas prices and grocery prices rising even more and not to mention the no insurance to those that do not have it and so forth. Land of the Free, that statement is appalling, mad you becha I am and emabarrassed to say it. I was raised poor watching one parent work two jobs raising three kids and still have nothing to show for it and the other serve in the Army for 22 in a half years and still have nothing to show for it. Here I am trying to better myself than what my parents did and this is what I get more heart ache and so forth. I am very overwhelmed with stress but, who really wants to hear my story or for that matter my crying as everyone in society today puts it. Life is not fair grab a helmet and hang on cause baby you are going for the ride of your life!