Classical liberals spend a lot of time talking about aspects of the criminal justice system we don’t like: laws punishing consensual, non-harmful activity between adults; police officers violating the Constitution; prosecutors forcing people to plead guilty; judges who are little more than prosecutors in robes; “correctional” approaches that only make people worse. Sometimes, it can even sound like we’re against law and order itself.
Thankfully, there are folks like the faculty of New York City’s New School to remind us of our more moderate side. Professor Cresa Pugh is offering a sociology class this semester called “How to Steal.” In this “field-based seminar,” students will earn four credit hours for exploring “the politics, ethics, and aesthetics of theft” from inside “corporate storefronts, grocery chains, museums, libraries, banks, and cultural institutions.” They will investigate whether it’s “possible to steal back what was already stolen” and discern when theft counts as “survival, protest, or care.” They’ll be invited to embrace “moral ambiguity, radical ethics, and imaginative justice.”
Not all of this is completely bonkers. Much of Professor Pugh’s scholarship is about the looting of artifacts by European colonizers, which, yeah, was often theft. It’s also certainly fair to remember that someone can justly steal a loaf of bread to keep from starving (as long as the existence of modern welfare systems is kept up front and center as an alternative). But equating the story of how mummies ended up in the British Museum with how pretzels get to your local Publix is ridiculous. And implying that Walmart has it coming when fraudsters steal its TVs is more juvenile than it is just. Free exchange is what colonialist theft wrongly denied. It is also what American commerce ideally embodies.
It’s also worth noting that the New School course is being offered at a time when parts of the left are romanticizing crime, even violence. Ivy League grad Luigi Mangione has become an anti-capitalist folk hero since assassinating UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Over the summer, anti-Zionists shot dead a young couple outside Washington’s Jewish Museum, tried to burn down the home of Pennsylvania’s governor, and firebombed marchers against Hamas in Boulder, Colorado—killing an 82-year-old woman.
Classical liberalism shares the concerns of the broad American left about many aspects of the criminal justice system (though we’re more consistent about criticizing gun control). But classical liberals insist that life and property are inalienable rights (as, in fairness, do many progressives). We are against the government violating these rights, which is why we demand limits on its power. We are also against private citizens infringing on them through crime, which is why many of us have little appetite for calls to abolish police and prisons.
Too much criminal law threatens to destroy freedom. So can too little.