Hasan Piker, the far-left political commentator and streamer, has enjoyed a remarkable rise into the mainstream left media ecosystem. He has now campaigned alongside Democratic Senate candidates, been a guest on some of the largest podcasts in America, and appeared on CNN and NBC News. Most recently, the New York Times published a conversation between Piker, the paper's culture editor Nadja Spiegelman, and the New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino. The topic: is theft ever justified?

In their conversation, Tolentino argues that "stealing from a big box store … [is not] very significant as a moral wrong." Piker's response in agreement: "I'm pro stealing from big corporations, because they steal quite a bit more from their own workers." 

Piker and his interlocutors are at least self-aware enough not to want to justify theft against everyone, so they conveniently set limits to when stealing is acceptable. When asked if it would be acceptable to steal from Zohran Mamdani's city-owned grocery stores, Piker responds, "No, I would not, because I feel like that's taxpayer-funded, it's union labor, and the prices are also adjusted regardless." 

In other words, theft's only okay when it comes to the bourgeoisie — they have no right to property because the system is unjust. As Spiegelman puts it, "Jeff Bezos has too much money — he's a billionaire — so why should I have to pay for organic avocados?"

Microlooting, as they call it, "has a slight political valence to theft, as opposed to just the thrill of getting away with something." Microlooting, in other words, is theft as a form of political protest. But fundamentally, microlooting is still just theft. "[I]f it was as easy as pirating intellectual property, I would" steal a car, Piker clarified. Thus, there may be an appeal to "political protest" but the practical criteria just seems to be viability. 

And whether the Times' trio only justifies stealing from the wealthy or justifies stealing broadly, the same result emerges — that they are dismantling the building blocks of our civilization. Liberal democratic capitalism — the system that all three have benefited immensely from — relies on some basic precepts. John Locke articulated these as natural rights to life, liberty, and property. Adam Smith argued that commerce and manufacturing cannot flourish "in which the people do not feel themselves secure in the possession of their property." And property rights aren't even just economically useful, but they're also a necessary condition for liberty broadly. As F.A. Hayek argued, "There can be no freedom of the press if the instruments of printing are under government control, no freedom of assembly if the needed rooms are so controlled, no freedom of movement if the means of transport are a government monopoly."

And the natural rights at the center of liberal democratic capitalism are not given or taken away, based on who the right-bearer is. The Declaration of Independence's radicalism was in part because it promised "inalienable rights" to "all men." The promise of natural rights was never just to people of only a certain ethnicity, nationality, or religion. So too with wealth. Everyone can agree the poorest in our society deserve the same rights to life, liberty, and property as the most wealthy. But reverse that statement, and agreement becomes far less universal. But there's no difference. If you believe that wealth shouldn't be a determining factor in someone's rights, then you should believe that in all cases. 

And even putting the moral question aside, the preservation of property rights — with its attendant injunction against stealing — provides us with the predictability necessary for economic flourishing. Piker assumes that the stability of our society is naturally occurring. It is not. Each time he receives payment from Twitch, swipes his credit card, or purchases a service, he assumes that the set of rules necessary for a functioning capitalist society will persist. And the preservation of property is fundamental to that predictability. One study, for example, found that governments going from no cadastral system (records of land ownership) to a full cadastre system is associated with an immediate 2.86 percentage point increase in GDP per capita.