Without the existence of law, there cannot be property.

In an unrelated conversation with Bram, we started shooting the shit about capitalist economies. He is right in asserting that capitalism does not require anyone to be fair. It is a system set up to encourage people to look out only for themselves, and fuck everyone else. In of itself, there is nothing wrong with that.

His take was, in a sense, an apologia for the depredations of companies such as Enron, Worldcom, Adelphia, and the like. And I get his point. It’s nonsensical to expect greedy bastards to act altruistically. But my counter to that is that we also live in a democratic republic, which is, by definition, a nation of laws.

Fact of the matter is that laws form complex, highly-interrelated structures, often known as civilization, and if you obviate certain laws, you run the risk of destabilizing the entire structure. Hence, frequently, things like theft and deceit are explicitly made anathema in these structures.

Simply put, stealing and lying are pretty much things that most civilizations cannot afford to espouse, no matter how capitalistic you want your civilization to be.

Laws against stealing encode the notion of property. Laws against deception encode the notion of trust. Interestingly, these two ideas—property and trust—are the basis of any and every economic system.

Without property, and without trust, you cannot have transactions.

So my argument is this: if you allow laws to be broken willy-nilly, particularly laws that encode the primordial ideas of property and trust, you run the risk of completely destabilizing your civilization. In other words, you encourage anarchy. Whether this anarchy will simply result in the rich and powerful being able to disregard each and every law ever drafted, leaving the less fortunate to the tender mercies of their capricious whim, or whether this will result in the violent masses rising up and killing the rich and the powerful (and make no mistake, it has happened many times in human history), I can’t predict, but in any case, your capitalist economy is destined to be shot to shit if you let this kind of bullshit stand.

Hence, unless you’re a fan of anarchy and subsistence economies, it is always in your self-interest to punish people who are proven to have broken the law.