I still don't understand how that makes it better.

If you hustle someone who's poor, maybe they won't be able to make rent on their primary residence next month.

If you hustle someone who's rich, they're probably still going to be rich next month.

"Maybe" and "probably" are a lot of assumptions. Hustling is a shitty activity that isn't made better by the status of the victim.

Putting people in prison is a shitty thing too, but it's still better to do it to people who are actually a menace to society. Something doesn't have to be good in an absolute sense to be better (than an alternative) in a regular one. Even if we're just dealing with statistical probabilities, hustling the rich seems less egregious than hustling the poor. Would you have reacted so strongly if the same sentiment had been expressed as "preying on the poor is especially bad"?

> Would you have reacted so strongly if the same sentiment had been expressed as "preying on the poor is especially bad"?

Nope. Preying on anyone is bad. A rich person could lose everything in a hustle the same as a poor person. It's only the extent of the hustle that makes it better or worse. E.g., hustling someone for a fraction of their assets is better than taking all of their assets. The value of the assets is not relevant.

Do you seriously think taking half of a poor person's assets is the same as taking half of a rich person's? I suggest a little reading on the concept of marginal utility before making more simplistic moral statements.

> Hustling is a shitty activity that isn't made better by the status of the victim.

But it is made worse by the status of the victims.

Also, I'd say that victim-status is the variable that's responsible for most (but certainly not all) of the "shittiness" of the activity.

It only made worse by the extent of the hustle. E.g., hustling someone for a fraction of their assets is better than taking all of their assets.

> It only made worse by the extent of the hustle. E.g., hustling someone for a fraction of their assets is better than taking all of their assets.

No.

It's pretty clear that it's worse to hustle a poor person out of 85% of their assets, and have them wind up homeless under a bridge, than it is to hustle a rich person out of 85% of their assets, and have them wind up living a comfortable upper-middle-class life. Both these scenarios involve the same "fraction of [personal] assets," which shows that some simple numerical comparison doesn't properly capture the essence of what we're talking about.