What would happen if the world legalized theft?

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  • Well, the question is a bit unclear and here’s why.

    Most jurisdictions don’t recognize any crime called “theft.” They recognize a number of crimes such as robbery, burglary, and larceny that people all commonly refer to as “theft.”

    So, which of these crimes specifically would be legalized? If just larceny, which is arguably the most straightforward of the “theft” crimes, it would be bad, but certainly not as bad as legalizing burglary and/or robbery which would also effectively allow people to break into other people’s homes/businesses and to steal from people using physical force/threats.

    However, it’s important to remember that most “theft” crimes, even in the case of simply just larceny, overlap significantly with other crimes that are usually committed in the process such as trespassing, breaking and entering, threatening, assault, fraud, forgery, or computer/hacking crimes. So even if robbery, burglary and larceny were all legalized it’s difficult (but not impossible) to commit any of these types of thefts without somehow committing some other crime in the process that the law could could still go after you for

    No matter what though, legalizing any/all of this is obviously a horrible idea. But exactly how horrible depends on a lot of things.

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    • More importantly, WHO is being burgled. I mean, stealing is stealing but WHO you steal from matters more.

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