Successful Criminals

The first and most essential ingredient in committing crime is a moral commitment which denies your activity is a crime.
The term “crime” typically has an official definition in jurisprudence, but it amounts to anything the ruling regime doesn’t like, and is willing to exert serious effort to stop. It won’t matter what the real or supposed motives of such laws are, because there isn’t a single Western government which God likes, only those He tolerates for short periods. I love the people with whom I share a geographical association, but I love all people, and my calling as a prophet places my loyalty outside any human government. Somewhere in the near future, I suspect just publishing such a sentiment will be considered a criminal act, but that just proves my point. You need not take seriously anyone else’s definition of “crime” except as a point of discussion. Given the way our laws and enforcement are structured and used here in the US, every living resident is just one police encounter from being labeled a criminal regardless of written laws.
The first necessity for success as a criminal is to believe without any shred of a doubt what you are doing is in everyone’s best interest. Short of that, simply convince yourself it is not harmful beyond what life itself offers. Bonus points if what you do actually meets some human need, or even some human wish. If people will pay for what you do, that’s a leg up on moral arguments, though we have to understand every human wants at least some things they shouldn’t have. Still, if people act like you are meeting a real need and are willing to take risks to obtain your service and/or product, which service or product produces no real moral harm to others, you are probably in the clear. If you don’t believe in what you are doing, stop it, regardless whether it’s a “crime.”
As regular readers know, there is a huge difference between noting something is morally dangerous to the community versus the question of how to enforce it. I say prostitution is evil, but it would hardly be a viable business if families cared the least about what God says families should do. The real problem with prostitution is all the other crime which attaches to it, which itself often reflects merely the mistakes in enforcement. The prophet in me says: Mind your own business and do what’s right; God takes care of the rest. Prostitution shouldn’t be illegal in the current sense of the term “illegal,” but you can’t please God and engage in the business.
Violence and confiscation requires an extreme justification, and is not a business model. This is what governments do, and they hate competition. But crimes which respond to what seems a genuine human need, such as smuggling and dodging unjustified regulation, is pretty easy to justify before the Lord. People gotta eat, and government mandated poison is wrong all the way around. Tobacco may be harmful for most uses, but I can’t justify through Scripture making smoking and chewing a crime. Living on earth is harmful, too. If people will buy your smuggled cigarettes, I won’t condemn it. The moral watershed has more to do with your attitude as a smuggler than the act itself. Helping people is helpful, and hard to condemn.
Taxation itself is not evil. It’s what governments make of it that becomes evil. As noted in previous posts, we are already seeing a wave of scrapping thefts. This hardly compares to what amounts to theft by government, and look for that to get worse faster than the private criminal version. We already have a serious theft problem with government “forfeitures.” Other bureaucratic entities, such as banks and their predatory lending with blatantly illegal foreclosures, are also in on the game. The underlying principle is bureaucracies refuse to cut back. Their health depends on keeping the power and the wealth flowing, and the system resists going on a diet. The first thing they cut is what they give back to the public, which is their real justification for existing. As things continue sliding downhill, bureaucratic entities will take the lion’s share of what’s left, humanity be damned. There comes a point when crime from the top de-legitimizes the entity itself, so that nothing it says and wants is right. Search your own conscience, but dodging current taxation and regulation is not necessarily wrong morally.
To those who would suggest what I promote here contributes to social decline: Shut up and stop lying. There is not a thing you can do within current social orthodoxy which will help at all. We are past the tipping point. We were past it long, long ago, but only a few have been willing to recognize it. The West has never been legitimate, ever. No Western government has ever been legitimate in God’s eyes, but He has used them for His own private reasons. Even if we presume to adopt the moral standards of the Enlightenment whence modern democratic governments arose, we have failed utterly. Not a single society has taken the moral high road under even that standard and required governments to behave properly. What I promote is hardly nihilism. I don’t promote destruction, but purposed defiance in the human interest. There really is a good moral standard for this world in its fallen state, and we have done our best as nations to avoid that standard. Prissy middle-class Western society is inherently evil, and we need to get over it.
To be a good moral businessman today makes you a criminal. Once you grasp the underlying moral issues, you can understand the first order of business is believe in what you do. Never evince the least embarrassment just because you know the majority of those you encounter will call it evil. Stop following the herd. Instead, feed the herd. Find out what you can do and enjoy meeting human needs. Realize there are risks regardless what governments think about it, simply because the real world is risky at the best of times. Arrest, conviction and prison is morally the same as being kidnapped and held for ransom, or simply being taken as a slave. Some people probably deserve it, but any more I’m not convinced even half of our prison population belongs there. So plan your “criminal” activities with the assumption it’s likely you’ll have encounters with private and government crooks, both.
Think like a businessman and know how to cut your losses and scram. Provide honest goods and services at a price where you aren’t a predator, but accounting for the probability of loss. If you can improve methods to lower the risk, lower the price accordingly. Be more reliable and honest than crooks and people will love you and help protect your business. Never mind whether your business is otherwise morally right; get just that part right and you’ll be nearly impossible to stop. For example, precious few law enforcement agencies have yet to face a genuine businessman’s approach to dope dealing. Should a small time pusher actually provide an honest service, and take wise precautions based on real industrial intelligence for threats, police would likely never even get a mole inside. What destroys every criminal operation is excessive greed or other moral weaknesses. It’s going to be this which destroys most Western governments in the end.
God’s Laws favor those who are just, and treat designations such as “criminal” as merely a fact of business conditions.