Social justice for fantastika? Or entitlement of parasites?

While surfing idly that morning, I was briefly attracted to a curious story about the North Pond Hermit:

The man who spent nearly three decades in the woods of Maine before his high-profile arrest earlier this month has attracted a marriage proposal and a stranger’s offer to bail him out, prompting authorities to dramatically increase his bail Sunday amid fears he could be targeted for exploitation.

Christopher Knight, known as the North Pond Hermit to locals, spent 27 years in the woods with virtually no contact with other people. But in the short time since his arrest he’s had a lot of people trying to get close to him, officials said.

This mildly remarkable story about an obvious and somewhat sad case of a social misfit wouldn't have taken more of my time than it took to read the above quote. However, something made me read the comments at the end, and a comment made by someone with a moniker fantastika immediately attracted my attention. Here it goes:

Quarter of a $million bail for a burglar?

This department of the Maine Gestapo must not have read the Constitution, that part about "cruel and unusual punishment."

Murderers and child predators get out on less bail.

Besides, what was he doing - just getting some social justice?

Is there a dime's worth of difference between the government taxing people and giving them free food, and this man just helping himself to free food?

At least the Hermit's method doesn't impose any bureaucrat's salaries and pension costs.

My interest wasn't caused by fantastika's obvious reading comprehension problems (s/he totally misinterpreted the motives of the authorities behind the bail increase, to take one example). Nor was I surprised by that "department of the Maine Gestapo": it only crystallized in my mind the image of the character who wrote that (I bet s/he uses Amerikkka as a moniker for his/her country).

Nope, it was the sentence about getting some social justice that caught my attention. And its immediate corollary, of course, the one about the purported lack of difference between government taxing and individual thievery.

Reading this "grassroots" social philosophy, I was struck by a revelation: I am much older than I thought before. My knowledge of the socialist economic theory (never to become practice) is outdated, rusty and doesn't stand a chance of a fart in a hurricane in the modern world. Where I used to laugh (or cry) at the Marx-Engels-Lenin's pearls like "expropriate from the expropriators" and "From each according to his ability, to each according to his contribution"*, fantastika and his Occupiers colleagues came and put paid to these old maxims. No more "from", ladies and gentlemen! Only the glorious "to"...

You don't have to contribute anything in the brave new world of the fantastika's "social justice". You just go and expropriate whatever you want: this is the new "justice" and the new society where Occupiers, these mostly young and mostly educated** parasites and their likes could really thrive.

And re "expropriate from the expropriators": here is an example of the kind of expropriators the hero of our story expropriated from:

Knight was arrested after authorities said he tripped a surveillance sensor set up by a game warden while stealing food from a camp for people with special needs.

My personal sympathies for Robin-Hoodian activities aside, I guess pilfering stuff from people with special needs is less risky than breaking into a mansion of some fat cat - it figures. Besides, who cares: after all, Mr Knight only executed his inalienable right of social justice.

Yeah... when I compare the old dead communists and socialists with this new breed of "social revolutionaries", the conclusion is clear. Even if I despise that old guard and wish they were never born, I have to say that, while being terminally optimistic, they still weren't terminally stupid. Unlike this new bunch, who in their fervor to expropriate, will only destroy everything in a jiffy. Only to die later, of hunger or choked by their own excreta (or both), like a colony of useless bacteria.

Too bad.

P.S. Other comments to the story in that first link are also worth some attention. More pearls.

(*) The formula of remuneration for labor in a socialist society, later to be replaced (when a full communism is built) by "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs". Still, even in a Marxist paradise a person was supposed to contribute that which fits his abilities.

(**) Our modern education, focused on political correctness, has much to blame for. When the end product of that education is unable to distinguish between the sentence "All people are equal" and the sentence "All people have equal rights", we are in trouble. But this is a subject for another long rant...

Update: and another view of entitlement: