Re:Cops still take more stuff from people than burglars do
by robocat on Friday August 04, 2023 @04:00PM
(#37005078)
Try not paying a parking fine, and you might find you get “stolen from” without your consent by debt collectors, credit rating agencies (and the services you need that use those agencies), and finally the court system can steal from you. Do you think taxes are theft? Plenty of people would argue taxes are not consensual.
Words can mean whatever we want.
“Theft from the government” could be defined as someone being insufficiently civil, or someone showing insufficient altruism towards other citizens.
How do you figure?
The way I see it, civil forfeiture IS theft. Taking something that belongs to someone else without their consent is theft and that seems to be precisely what civil forfeiture consists of. Just because a court has labelled it differently if someone in a blue hat does it does not make it suddenly not theft. It is simply court-sanctioned theft.