Porch pirates undermine some of the fundamental aspects of a free society.
It is hard to get a fixed number for packages stolen annually from US consumers. Estimates on the low end are 58 million per year and on the high side well over 100 million. The losses are in the billions. Consumers suffer when they have to reorder goods and look out for thieves, and businesses pay dearly for having to re-send goods that never arrived.
A popular genre online involves videos of porch pirates grabbing others’ property and then having the latter explode in noise, paint and/or glitter. The first time I saw such an event involved a NASA engineer who made his stolen package exceptionally sophisticated. The more recent crop generally leaves the thief covered in one or multiple colors of paint and oftentimes coated with debris. A couple of things stand out:
The thieves are both men and women, black and white, young and old.
Oftentimes, the thief arrives in a nice car and/or well-dressed.
The pirates vary between the daring grab-and-run versus the entitled “I have come to take that which is mine”.
The painted pirates generally appear a bit dazed and confused after their surprise. Some have the additional fun of having to clean their car’s interior.
Many of the thieves look right at a Ring or similar doorbell camera prior to the heist. There are those who taunt the actual owner of the goods that they are stealing.
Finally, many of those who look painted for a local football game curse or threaten the rightful package owner via said doorbell camera.
The latter behavior is for me the most puzzling and disconcerting. Stealing is nothing new, and free goods sitting on an unguarded porch are more appealing than similar items in a store, where an owner and/or security guard might intervene. What amazes me is the open chutzpah of those who return to the camera and either curse out or threaten the owner of the package for getting the drop on them. There is entitlement and then there is entitlement. “How dare you protect your personal property and set this colored bomb to go off on me and my car!” While many slink away, these others behave as if the property of others truly belongs to them. In a similar video that did not involve explosions or paint, a woman pushes her fairly young daughter towards an unattended package so as to take it. What values are you passing on to your kids? Is there no moral compass left for much of America?
Many moral philosophers made property rights central to the existence of a functional society. If one cannot keep that which he earns, then why bother working? Communist and socialist economies produce almost nothing of international use, so why should I invent something, only for the government to either take all of my property or a big chunk of it? We’ll ignore China for the time-being, due to its hybrid communist/pseuodo-market structure. It is not a coincidence that the US has 21 of the top 25 companies in the world by market capitalization. Two of the others are ASML and Samsung in free-market countries Taiwan and South Korea. The Europeans have none while China and Saudi Arabia each have one. If we cannot take property rights for granted, there will be no impetus to create or improve on that which we already have. Imagine a new baseball commissioner decreeing that no player salary can exceed $50,000 per year. You would not see the same quality of players going forward. Athletes would figure out if their future is in basketball, football, golf or some other endeavor if baseball no longer rewards great skill sets. If people can steal what you have rightfully paid for with your hard-earned cash, there is no further reason to make an effort to work hard, make money and expect to enjoy the fruits of your efforts.
Obviously, many solutions have been put forward to address the porch thievery problem. None of them involve throwing such criminals into jail for five years. Instead, society has taken the “Chelm” approach. There are many Jewish books about the city of Chelm, where the city fathers did stupid things, like build a hospital at the base of a dangerous bridge rather than fix it. Potential solutions that do not include punishing the guilty include: lock boxes with codes known to delivery personnel, actual Amazon key access to your car trunk or house interior, contact with a delivery person in real time. Where there is a multibillion dollar problem, there is a strong driver to find working solutions. Americans are the kings of finding solutions to problems. The issue is that there is a fundamental problem when people feel that they have the right to pilfer the goods of others whenever they so please. I have often mentioned that the reduction in religiosity in the West and America has implications from low birth weights to anti-American zeal. The total lack of respect for property rights is a dangerous feature of modern America. If people don’t believe that they will get the stuff that they ordered, they will stop ordering. Online orders in the US make for over $1 trillion. It is a key component of the modern American economy.
While some technical solutions may reduce the number of packages stolen, the fundamental moral rot cannot be fixed through governmental fiat. Sure, one can empower homeowners to shoot porch pirates; that might stop or slow down the trend. The real solution is in the family and good values being taught at a young age. When I saw the video of the woman pushing her daughter to steal the package, I felt that the whole underpinning of the great American Experiment was being destroyed by what looks like such a simple action. How will this girl be convinced that stealing is bad? Why would she make an effort to make a living if she can just steal the things she wants?
So please keep making those porch pirate paint videos. One fellow said that he got rid of an old TV by putting it in the box of his new one and leaving it outside to be stolen. The US way of life and God-given rights are for a “moral people” in the words of John Adams. We can try to fix things on the edges, but in the end we need to fix the core problem.