| > Again, who cares if it was just your shoe size? Whoever cares, cares, and it's none of your business. Noone is suggesting that you should not be allowed to allow companies to collect your shoe size and sell that information, so you are mostly just missing the point. There are people who do not want to allow that, and there is absolutely no reason why we should force them to allow it. Claiming that what you stole is of little value does not make your theft legal. It is simply not up to you to decide what has sufficient value to keep for other people. If you take something that is someone else's property without them transferring property rights to you first, that is theft, and it is completely irrelevant whether you think that they shouldn't value what you took. > Did we stop living in a capitalist economy and nobody told me? If anything, you seem to have a very confused understanding of capitalism. The one core idea of capitalism is strong individual property rights, because that is the basis for decentralized price discovery. Capitalism could not possibly work if the state simply declared that property rights for low-valued goods (based on a valuation decided by the state, presumably) a not enforceable, or if you could simply steal and use your competitor's machinery to produce goods as long as you didn't harm them (like, returned them repaired before their next production run, maybe?). The fact that someone could make money by violating your property rights certainly never was a justification that allowed them to avoid punishment in a capitalist system. |