Overview

• Stated generally, theft is the taking of another’s property without consent. This consistently violates the Legal Principle.
• Theft is an example of the first line of 3L’s definition of aggression: ‘initiating nonconsensual physical force against another person or their property.’
• Examples of theft are when someone is deprived of their peacefully-obtained property by:
  • An individual using threats of or actual physical force - typically called ‘robbery’
  • A group using threats of or actual physical force - includes government ‘taxation’, and mafia ‘protection payments’
    • When governments force the adoption of their state currency and undermine its value by creating more of it, this is called ‘inflation’. Forcing the use of currency is really coercion, but the effect of inflation is similar to theft.