Democratic order rests on a thin agreement that most people will not take what is not theirs even when the camera is off, that shops will still be there in the morning, and that officials will not recast theft as justice. Lars Møller's argument in Pandering to Predation (link below), is that this agreement is neither natural nor self-repairing, and that it is now being talked out of existence by people who live off the surplus the agreement produces while treating the agreement itself as optional. The illustration is recent and local. After watching arraignments in Manhattan, New York Assemblywoman Emily Gallagher announced that stealing soap and toothpaste was a "crime of poverty" driven by "biological need," and that society should not protect billion-dollar pharmacy chains ahead of the destitute. Poverty can explain a theft without licensing it. Organized rings already account for a large share of retail loss. Chains respond by locking toothpaste behind plastic or leaving the neighbourhood. Gallagher's sentence did not invent the practice; it supplied an official alibi for an attitude that is simultaneously parasitic and hostile to the legal order that makes the harvest possible.
That alibi has a pedigree. Proudhon's "property is theft" inverted the polarity so that the owner became the robber and the taker the restorer. Marx's articles on the Prussian wood-theft laws performed the same operation on customary gathering. Later illegalists treated burglary as individual reappropriation. Digital subcultures distilled it further: if it is a chain, it is a free-for-all; insurance will absorb the loss; wage theft by the corporation already cancelled the moral debt. Academic discussions of necessity and proportionality sometimes explore the same boundary. The cumulative repertoire reframes predation as correction and compliance as complicity. The practical test arrives whenever ordinary deterrents thin. The 1965 and 2003 blackouts produced mutual aid and falling arrests; darkness alone did not dissolve restraint. The 1977 New York blackout, set against unemployment, panic and eroded legitimacy, produced looting, arson and thousands of arrests. Context, not the mere absence of light, decided the outcome. The unrest after George Floyd's death supplied a larger data set: insured losses of one to two billion dollars, more than 1,300 buildings damaged in Minneapolis-St. Paul alone, commercial burglaries doubling in a week, homicides rising more than fifty percent while clearance rates fell. Opportunists and organised rings used the temporary withdrawal of police, whether from overload or policy, to strip commercial corridors with remarkable speed. When formal restraint thins and an ideological justification for taking is already circulating, both property and persons become available.
The fate of pandering to that repertoire is not mysterious. Officials who translate it into rhetoric weaken the deterrent signal and tell the law-abiding that the protection of ordinary commerce is negotiable. Retailers install barriers, shorten hours or leave. Residual residents inherit inconvenience and risk. Opportunists update their estimate of the probability of being caught. The equilibrium is unstable because the subculture consumes the residual productivity of institutions it simultaneously scorns. It cannot, in the long run, replace the queue, the unlocked shelf or the assumption that the shop will open tomorrow; it can only live off them until they are gone. Modern cities concentrate wealth and grievance, amplify both through instantaneous media, and house politicians ready to convert the combination into votes. Blackouts and riots merely make visible what already operates under ordinary light: the locked aisle, the boarded front, the quiet calculation that certain forms of theft are no longer, in official language, truly theft. A polity that still claims the rule of law cannot treat that language as compassion without dissolving the forbearance on which the law depends. The lights do not have to fail for the fragility to show. It is already priced into the plastic case around the toothpaste.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/09/pandering-to-predation/