The Seventh Commandment: Thou shalt not steal.

I want to scream it to the world: Thou shalt not steal! This morning’s newspaper reported a young man as saying “Yes, I shoplift. But I never steal from friends, just from corporations, like Walmart. I steal from Walmart all day”. He is obviously not alone. It is reported that in the USA $32.3 billion is shoplifted annually and 4 times that amount is stolen via employee theft. Equally stunning: 74% of people polled thought that taking something from someone else is probably okay as long as the other person is not going to miss the stolen object.

I just mailed in my Federal and Sate Income Tax returns. I hope I did not steal. If I was completely honest I was unlike thousands of others. The IRS reports that if no one cheated on their taxes our national debt could be retired in one year.

If course, it is not only “others” that people steal from.  I wonder what the figure is for hyped expense accounts. Then there is the matter of simply no putting in an honest day’s labor for an honest day’s wages.

The Internet is a wonderful way to just ignore intellectual property rights. My son recently reported that after working as an advisor for two years with a PL D candidate he discovered at the very last minute that almost all of her dissertation had been plagiarized (since it was translated from the Chinese, the candidate probably thought it would go undetected.)  My young friends say that if you were completely honest about downloading music there would be nothing good to listen to.

I railed against stealing recently and a friend stopped me short. “Mel,” she said, “If your child was starving to death and you had no money would you steal a couple of bananas? Would that be so terrible?” I reflect upon whether or not I am a partner in any system that exploits the poor or withholds resources due others.

I even ask myself, “Did I “steal” when I did not report the source for the statistics quoted above. But then a voice pipes up, “Come on, Mel, this is a simple blog read by very few. It is not about to be published in some famous research journal. Come off it!”

 

So I work on being honest and not stealing. And I am pointed to good old Martin Luther when he says in his explanation of this 7^th Commandment that we should not only “not take our neighbors’ money or goods, but should help them to protect and improve their property and business”; and I hear my father repeating that age-old axiom, “Honesty is the best policy.”