I have an economics teacher that made this claim in class yesterday. I wanted to know other people’s thoughts about it.
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.
6 posts and 0 comments? My guess is, I can type in here absolutely anything, and you won’t reply. You’re asking questions, but do you even want to hear the answers?
Go ahead and stop guessing. I don’t owe anyone a response. I asked a question and I wanted to hear people’s answers. But you didn’t even do that so why SHOULD I reply? If I want too, I will.
Thanks for the answer. 👍
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 So if the law says debt is no longer valid, then the loan agreements cease to be property and there is no stealing it.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.
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
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.
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.
No more so then all the COVID loans forgiven for members of Congress.
No.
My thought is that you should find a different class with a different teacher.
In the strictest legal sense it’s not stealing.
Forgiving loans of those who followed a program and qualified is definitely not stealing. Not forgiving those loans and forcing payment, is at least analogous to stealing.
Blanket forgiveness of all loans is similar to stealing from future generations, as it is government debt that isn’t getting repaid as expected.
Why would it be government debt? Just cancel the loan, don’t pay it on behalf of the borrower.
The government guarantees the loan. Student loans are ultimately the government taking out a loan on behalf of a citizen.
This is why you check rate my professor and you should put this on there as well.
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.
I am presumably a lot less qualified to speak on matters of economics than an economics teacher (assuming they became one through a background or qualification in economics), I’m also not even from the US. That disclosure aside, given you put this question to the masses and to the world here’s my take.
I can’t figure out how your teacher could have come to this conclusion with intellectual honesty. If my amateur’s understanding is correct, this forgiveness program is achieved by the US government paying for the loans, so it’s difficult to say on a basic level how any theft can have occurred. This is especially plain given the program is limited specifically to loans issued by US government in the first place as Federal student loans. If I loan you money and then tell you not to worry about paying it back after all because I’ve decided to forgive the loan I can’t find a way to frame that as theft. Who’s been stolen from?
If I really stretch I could see people who paid their own loans in full before this happened feeling like it was pretty unfair, but they weren’t stolent from, just unlucky in timing. Some people will say of taxes generally, that they feel like the money taken from them by the government in taxes is theft, but in that case this specific instance of government expenditure is no more theft then the latest batch of F35 fighter jets bought by the military or the wages paid to the local garbage collector to take out your garbage or any government spending at all, since that money all comes from taxes. Maybe your teacher is trying to tie the potential economic costs of the policy in to a narrative of stealing from US taxpayers. Maybe the costs of the program could theoretically mean taxes have to be raised at some point, but again though, you *already " have to pay taxes and how much, more taxes or less, is up to the administration in charge at any given time based on what they think is necessary. This is how the US or any country has a government at all which is generally considered necessary by most. When the government operates and uses taxes to do so, the citizens essentially pay for a service, that service involves the government making decisions on your behalf on what to do with the taxes you paid them. If most of the taxpayers don’t like the decisions and think they were bad choices they change their government and lobby representatives, it doesn’t make the decisions themselves theft if you just don’t like them.
That’s about all I can think of in the absence of your teacher’s justification, for how the loan forgiveness can be called theft, trying to be as fair as possible to those potential reasons, I still can’t find a way to make the statement true.
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.
Not any more than any other subsidy is.
Actually nullifying a debt a borrower owes to a lender, which the government guaranteed would be paid at the time the loan was issued would be akin to theft. As far as I know, all programs that “cancel” student loan debt are actually the government paying the balance to the issuer.
No. University tuitions are supposed to be government subsidized anyway. For example a semester in Germany is ~250€.
Woah an was für einer Uni bist du denn? Ich zahl 140€
One party’s debt is another party’s asset.
So yes, cancelling a debt looks the same as stealing cash in the issuing party’s bookkeeping.
