Asklemmy

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

No. A more educated population is better in every way.

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 So if the law says debt is no longer valid, then the loan agreements cease to be property and there is no stealing it.

No more so then all the COVID loans forgiven for members of Congress.

My thought is that you should find a different class with a different teacher.

No. University tuitions are supposed to be government subsidized anyway. For example a semester in Germany is ~250€.

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.

It's the same answer to "if you give someone a gift, did they steal from you?" or "is a discount stealing?"

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

Stealing from who? It's a social program, if society has deemed it necessary and the bourgeoisie allows it then it is simply spending.

No.

Stealing is usually defined as taking something that exists in a way that denies the original owner its use and grants the illegitimate owner its use.

This is how loans work in fractional reserve banking: loan provider has assets of $1 million, they loan out $10 million, having wholesale created the additional $9 million. If those loans are forgiven, but the original assets did not change, what has been stolen?

A fictitious amount of theoretical money.

If I make up an image, and I make a copy of that image that i send to you and you delete, but I get to keep the original, is that theft? No. Obviously not. Made up money is no different.

Only by the rich people who are actually stealing from us. PPP loan forgiveness for their litany of fraudulent claims...

No.

Stealing = the act of taking feloniously the personal property of another without his consent and knowledge

There is nothing felonious or illegal here. The universities signed on to deals for government funding and the money comes with strings.

No, if you forgive the student loans so that the graduates can contribute back with their knowledge to society.

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.

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.

An actually civilized society would want its citizens educated. Does stealing matter in a world of barbarity for profit?

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.

No, I don't think so. Did they give any reasoning for me? Maybe I'm missing something

No.

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 stolen 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.

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.

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?

I haven't taken an econ class in 8-9 years but I remember it saying there's no such thing as a free lunch. Someone has to pay for it. And when you frame things in that light, then yes I could see how an econ teacher would call that stealing.

But econ is a weird science, it's explaining human behaviors and people are weird.