That there can be such vehement disagreement ont he subject I think shows that it is a difficult issue in a grey area. We probably all agree on basic principles; that people should act in a responsible fashion in accord with the law. People should not harm others. People should not steal. Society should be set up to encourage responsible legal and efficient behavior.
It’s just when you start to get down to analyzing how to apply those seemingly clear general principles, you can come up with different answers. And that should be expected. A simple, clear book like the Torah generates millenia of commentary in the Talmud. Why would we expect clear results from seemingly simple rules?
I keep thinking about a malfunctioning slot machine in las vegas. What if you put in a buck and it constantly spit out $50, and you cannot be detected. You did it once, twice, three times. You keep winning. You know the machine isn’t working right. Is this like returning water as weed-killer to the store (clearly a criminal act, because of the knowledge and intent). Or is this more like a smart market operator, say a stock trader who’s found a way to game the system legally and celverly to produce guaranteed excess returns (a real-life Madoff).
My mom would probably tell the floor manager.
I would probably play the machine all night.
In some sense, the “winnings” here, free rent, are a logical consequence of a system where it doesn’t pay the bank to foreclose quickly. There’s no way that the lingering homeowner is like the weed-killer-returned example. You can prosecute the weed-killer guy and put him in jail — you cannot put the homeowner in jail. You may feel that you are permitted to rightfully heap derisive social comments on him, but that’s a different thing, particularly in an era when the morality around foreclosures is in flux. Similarly, you could heap derision on a promiscous chick int he 70’s, but if she thinks you’re crazy and square and not violating an social or legal code, your derision is not very socially meaningful or effective. It may make you feel good (or not) to blast away a bit, but if the object of your derision is chuckling, then you are kind of wasting your breath. The only reason for social derision is to try to get the object to shape up and conform to the old rules,a dn if they’ve already moved on and decided the old norms are dumb, then you are sort of dumb for trying to use that type of social control on them. Or maybe dumb’s the wrong word. Misguided. You can’t teacha pig to dance, that kind of thing…
Not sure about the laws in Nevada about knowing or should have known you were playing a defective slot machine.
always felt the housing gains were a bit like vegas, with a bigger cut to the House. Remember a fellow ecestatic lawyer who had flipped a condo in vegas for 100k a very somber, conservative dde, and all I could think was, this pinhead, making money hand over fist, more on the condos than he could make at the tables. so wrong. soooo wrong….and so arrogant about it….but, legal.
For the record, i persoanlly see nothing morally wrong with squatting while society figures out hwo to work in an efficient moral manner, but I probably wouldn’t do it myself.
