The 19th-century French economist Frédéric Bastiat ominously predicted the following. As official institutions become ever less protective of property rights, people’s own respect for each other’s property will decline too. There will be an increase in theft, particularly of public property but also of private property.
This is because official acts have powerful cultural import. The effect is cyclical: the less respect for property in the public realm, the more pillaging is permitted in the private realm. The reverse is also true.
This came to mind last year when I was touring an older house on the market that had been empty for a year. I was startled to see that all the wiring in the house had been torn out. I asked why. The realtor said that unless a house is occupied and secured, this always happens. Metal in general and copper in particular get a high price on the market.
That struck me as a bad omen but I had no idea precisely what was happening more broadly. Maybe you have heard about rampant metal theft in the United States? As it turns out, in the last several years, a huge part of public infrastructure has already been pillaged for metal. This includes streetlights, bridge parts, statuary, hydrants, and any electrical cables in many urban environments.
“The lights are going out across American cities, as a result of a brazen and opportunistic type of crime. Thieves have been stripping copper wire out of thousands of streetlights and selling it to scrap metal recyclers for cash. The wiring typically fetches only a few hundred dollars, but blacked-out lights pose safety hazards to drivers and pedestrians, and are costing cities millions to repair.”
This is in part because copper prices are up 66 percent over five years, making it so valuable that thieves have every incentive to take the risk of snagging everything that is not nailed down. There are active markets today for pillaged copper.
Referring to the high value of copper is an economic explanation for why crime pays. But it does not get to the root of the problem. This sort of thing should never happen in any civilized society, no matter the value of the resource that is being stolen. There are some things that are just wrong, and the restraint on individuals in a culture of respect for each other would necessarily stop this sort of thing from happening.
Quite simply, it’s just not civilized.
If you live in or near any big city in the United States, you know about the increase in petty theft. Some stores have empty shelves due to it, and others have for years now been locking up certain products to prevent them from being stolen. Some people in larger cities are having to drive to the suburbs to find stores with products they need.
Of course the attack on policing has not helped, and the tendency of some academics to justify these kinds of crimes as nothing other than different lifestyle choices has an impact. But will more policing really help? Perhaps but there is another truth to consider. No amount of policing and no amount of enforcement can replace a core cultural respect for property and ownership.
“When plunder becomes a way of life,” wrote Bastiat, “men create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”
Bastiat spoke about private property but in no society can everything be locked down. We simply cannot live that way. You have a planter on your front porch. Restaurants leave tables and chairs outside that cannot be secured from theft. Every public area of any beauty includes flowers and statuary that is secure based only on community expectation that it will be appreciated by others and not stolen.
There is simply no other way. All the surveillance and policing you can muster will not protect it if there is a cohort of the population determined to grab it from others.
I’ve long celebrated the power of markets and their moral underpinning in private property rights. But without a cultural foundation to support them, no institutional or technical means can sustain them. There simply is no legislation, law, or enforcement that can give them life without a deeper social consensus on respecting the difference between mine and thine. That comes about from long teaching and experience. Once in place, the institutions follow.
If the institutions fall apart, there is usually an underlying reason. I felt this certainly in 2020 and following with the pandemic response. I knew for sure that the power was in place to do something like lockdowns and wrote about it regularly for 15 years prior but I never imagined that it would actually happen. I assumed that there was enough cultural resistance to the idea and even knowledge of infectious disease to prevent that.
But once those days unfolded and millions of small businesses were shut and churches were closed, it became clear to me that I had failed to understand just how fragile the very foundations of civilization had become. It should not have unfolded the way it did. It should have been more than obvious that this was not the way to handle a pandemic. Even apart from “the science,” no free society can or should undertake such methods. But there we were.
The crisis has only deepened since those days. No matter which metric you want to examine—government and business indebtedness, dependency on public largesse, the rise in crime, the loss of respect for people, the decay of basic postulates of human dignity and biology—the decay is everywhere in evidence.
Property rights are a foundational principle but it is not only about private property. Public property too needs protection in any society where there are vast spaces that can be called the commons. If we are to maintain the commons, and some semblance of civilized living, we need a common culture on fundamental ethical presumptions. That is precisely what is under assault, with predictable consequences.
No one wants to live in a society in which public monuments, streetlights, and fire hydrants are not safe from vandals. Yes, the precipitating excuse might point to the price of copper. But in a good society, that should never happen anyway, regardless of the exigencies of the market price of resources.
So, yes, I worry what this new trend portends for the long term. No amount of policing can fix this. The only answer is some kind of spiritual revival but there is no legislation to make that possible.
