> I find the twisted reasoning in this comment shocking and I don't really know what to say.
You don't know what to say because saying shoplifting is moral (under some conditions) goes against the central belief you were raised with all your life: private property.
But following an ethics based on social equality, you realize that in many situations self-discouting (autoréduction) is the just thing to do.
We live in a world of money and private property. These ever-invasive tools of injustice are actually based on institutionalized theft. The land you work you don't "own". The house you live in you don't "own". The programs/websites you build you don't "own". So usage-based property (the oldest and only "natural" form of property) is out of the equation because society's belief in a piece of paper (a property title) dispossessed you from what you need/use.
So in this equation, we realize what we need (that has no price) was taken away from us by private property. When we take a look at the production/supply chain, we can follow the money to see who benefits from this worldwide scam. Take food: food costs little-to-nothing to grow (unless you do it with chemicals, which you should never), so it's a good sample of how a capitalist system behaves.
Food you find in supermarkets is grown by farmers. Their production is bought by logistics giants who will take it to supermarkets, or to logistics hubs run by supermarket chains. For supermarket chains (not small shops), it is rare to have more intermediates than this.
Yet, even with so few middlepersons, retail prices can be 5 times or even 10 times what the farmer was paid for the product. Here in France, we typically pay 2-6€/kg of vegetables in supermarkets (farmers markets are cheaper), while the farm gets paid typically less than a euro (with some exceptions for luxury produce).
So where does the money go? The middlepersons are an obvious answer. But supermarket owners are also responsible for the high prices of food.
So in the end, supermarkets are just the place where common people come to spend all their money to survive, while the person making the food can't pay their bills and is pushed slowly towards suicide (very common among farmers working for the industry). Can we call this "moral"? To me it sounds a lot like any other definition of slavery: working a lot to just earn your right to live and help other people be exploited.
Coming from this economic analysis, i believe anything you need you should steal from the rich and the powerful. We need to dismantle these people and their systems of oppression before they complete the destruction of our planet (they will never stop until then).
That's not to say that stealing is a moral way of life under every circumstance. But before i steal something, i ask myself these two questions:
- Is it a necessity or a nicety? (niceties-stealing is just another form of consumptionism)
- Am i stealing from a rich person or from a poor/working person? (in a supermarket, you're stealing from rich shareholders; in a smallshop, you're stealing from your neighbor's work, who themselves get ripped off by surrounding capitalist structures)
I know many people among you will not understand or approve my way of thinking. I'm not here to try and convince you. But you should understand that commerce and private property are not inherent aspects of humanity and that stealing is most times a necessity. Therefore stealing from the rich does not come from a delusion, but from the realization that the rules of the game are rigged and we need direct action to bring justice to the table.
P.S. I spent so much time on this crap instead of dismissing it shallowly because dang gets sad when people don't show intellectual cuiriosity ;)