Stealing from a bank is no more defensible than stealing from an individual. Banks have people behind them -- shareholders, creditors, and employees.
Classic quote: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”
Treating people differently through some arbitrary definition of difference is wrong. Either we're all equal in front of the law or some animals are more equal than others. And the kind of justice you're peddling is what has set countries across the world on fire recently; the uneven application of the law.
[Edit] I don't think I was clear. Everywhere we see special cutouts in the law, all that happens is that the more capable less scrupulous people capture those cutouts. The best we can hope to do is to treat everyone exactly the same in front of the law.
"Equal in front of the law" actually means that financial penalties should be progressive in the same way taxes should be. Some countries actually do this, and they're not on fire.
How would it not be treating "everyone exactly the same in front of the law" to just say that fines are assessed as a percentage of income and/or net worth?
All of that said, personally I wouldn't extend this all the way back to the original argument about theft though, stealing $1000 is the same regardless who you steal it from, at least as far as the law should be concerned. I could see a moral difference, but the law often does not (and can not) make moral distinctions. It could however make reasonable distinctions in the application of the punitive aspects, as it sometimes does in terms of jail sentencing.
The cost of risk externalized by one person speeding is about the same, modulo driver skill and location and whatnot; it is not very sensitive to rich the driver is. If the goal of the law is to impose enough additional risk of a fine to compensate for the externalized risk, then it makes perfect sense that millionaires don't need to obey speed limits--as long as they can pay up.
If the law is intended as a deterrent, this obviously isn't working.
Bean counters will manage it though, if asked.
And this is sensible. How do you compensate a family for a dead body? You can't. So the purpose of the law should be to prevent the need for that compensation in the first place.
I suspect you don't believe that, so when you say "the government treating someone differently (in anyway) due to who they are is wrong" what do you mean?
Do you believe that will have the same deterrent effect across society? I sure don't.
If enough people steal from "the bank" under your theory, the old blind lady winds up eating cat food and not being able to pay her rent because the bank is no longer profitable.
That doesn't sound quite as "defensible", now, does it?
Note that things like banks and insurance companies (another favorite whipping boy) do tend to have their stocks owned by things like retirement funds, precisely because they are considered low-risk investments with a safe (albeit small) yield.
It's simple to me. a single person stealing from a bank incurs a lot less suffering then a single person stealing from a welfare recipient. The damage done is simply not even comparable.
Yes, you absolutely are.
> it's proven that the government will swoop in and save the bank as happened
And you're also apparently seeing "the government" as a faceless entity with an unlimited amount of cash.
When the government "swoops in", it's at the expense of every single taxpayer.
I'm boggled that people are incapable of understanding this, or are in such denial about it that they feel the need to mod me down rather than debating the point.
That doesn’t necessarily justify a theft but $1000 isn’t identical utility to all.