A paycheck is not a credit card payment. The value is on the books as soon as the work is completed. If you don't intend to pay debt when you acquire it, that

A paycheck is not a credit card payment. The value is on the books as soon as the work is completed. If you don't intend to pay debt when you acquire it, that is fraud. But your equivalence ignores the counterparty: a worker is not loaning out their time to a company contingent on a loan agreement, they are making value as soon as the work is made, a fraction of which they own at that point. The terms are legally very different; one is a credit agreement and the other is a wage, because the counterparties are different. In an ideal world, the wage agreement is far stricter than the credit agreement -- hence, it is called "theft" when it is violated. Unfortunately, as stated in the article, we do not live in an ideal world.