Exodus 20:15

 

The 8^th Commandment is so written in The New American Bible: “You Shall Not Steal.”

 

My response: If people would just obey this commandment in simple terms, within traditional altruist ethics, that we are not to steal what belongs to others, the world would be a happier, much lawless place.

 

If we would not steal from others their possessions, their partners or spouses, their money (overcharging and gouging as a business owner), or their share of wealth (underpaying a wage-earner), time theft—where the employee steals value from an employer by taking the paid wage while goldbricking, treating customers shabbily, and doing shoddy work, by going to work every day with a sullen, poor attitude that deprives the workplace of happiness and solidarity, if the abusive, oppressive, exploitative employer, by mistreating employers that must go to work to get money to live, but are robbed of happiness by mean, sadistic owners, managers and supervisors, the world would be a calmer, more just, more pleasant world.

 

 Government theft of people’s wealth by overtaxing, overspending, and running up public deficit, robbing the people of their share of the pie and prosperity, this is immoral, legal theft of a high order, and is profoundly ruinous of people’s lives.

 

Here is the same commandment from the Holy Bible (KJV): “Thou Shalt Not Steal.”

 

My response: This commandment, whether it is the most relevant or significant one, I cannot say, but I will offer that it is one of the most ethically powerful commandments, should we come to bring into moral consciousness, a specter of theft, of a higher order, that is little mentioned or acknowledged.

 

This near-universal, popular, morally justified, higher order theft occurs near universally, historically, all the time, as the society of groupists and collectivists deprive each individual of her personal power, her decision-control and her liberty to be left independent to make her own decisions, to live her life as she will, to do what she will, to self-actualize or not, and how to, to what extent to and what will be the subject of interest that she will maverize towards.

 

The Good Spirits and good deities are maverizers and individuators on a grand scale. The immoral morality of altruism justifies this theft, this soul-raping. It must cease: we must release and sanction the young to maverize and to serve the Good Spirits. As virtuous and holy rational egoists, they will let none run their personal lives, and will allow themselves to run the personal lives of none other.