[wonderwonder]

This would essentially mean that most winners on every trade in equities, crypto, forex (except for central banks I guess) etc. are committing theft. When individuals enter a trade on these markets its soley to make a profit, very rarely is it to take physical delivery of a good that will be used. You make a trade based on your assumption of which way the price of that asset will go. Someone else makes an equal and opposite trade. One person is right. There is not always a loser on every transaction as one person can think an asset has peaked and exit in profit while the asset continues to gain value, but eventually there will be a loser.

Its a game that people play and there are winners and losers, but if everyone willingly enters then it is not theft.

It could be considered legalized gambling I guess but everyone involved is a gambler.

[AmericanChopper]

There is a non-trivial number of people who believe the very concept of private property is theft. Quite a few of them post comments on HN.

[erikpukinskis]

I think you have it a bit confused. We think property is violence not theft.

[AmericanChopper]

I believed the idea was originally popularised by the slogan “La propriété, c'est le vol”, where vol does translate to theft. But violence would certainly be quite similar to Proudhon‘s original meaning for the phrase.

Marx didn’t like the idea because he said it presupposes that property exists, which he obviously had a problem with. Fun fact, this disagreement was the primary conflict that split the IWA into seperate anarchist and Marxist movements. With the anarchists later going on to adopt national socialism, which at the time was known as fascism.