You WON’T like my answer…

This past weekend there’s been a lot of love between Americans and Japanese people celebrating each other’s cultures, and it’s been great to see. But I stumbled across a post from Senator Mike Lee that I wanted to address, because my answer is going to be a harsh reality that a lot of people aren’t going to like.
The post highlighted a Japanese citizen pointing out that in Japan, Apple products don’t need to be locked down in stores because people simply don’t steal them. You can see customers picking items up, looking at them, and putting them back. That’s it. Senator Lee posed the question of why America can’t have the same thing. And the answer isn’t complicated, but it does require honesty.
This is a cultural problem rooted in the erosion of private property rights. America has gotten away from the foundational principle that all rights are private property rights, starting with self-ownership. Your material property is an extension of that. But unfortunately, the political class in this country has spent years justifying bad behavior. You heard it during the summer of 2020 when businesses were being looted and destroyed — small businesses that never recovered — and the response from politicians and commentators was “it’s just stuff.” They told you the owners had insurance, clearly not understanding how insurance works, and dismissed the violation entirely.
It goes further. If you try to defend your private property, the state can criminalize you for it. I covered a story where a shop owner shot someone who was looting his business and got charged with murder because of duty-to-retreat laws. You have entire jurisdictions that won’t give you a felony unless you steal above a certain dollar amount. You can take thousands of dollars worth of merchandise and get a slap on the wrist. That’s the incentive structure America has built.
When you incentivize bad behavior, you get more of it. When you refuse to uphold private property rights as non-negotiable, trust erodes across the entire society. Japan doesn’t need to lock things down because their culture upholds those norms. America could have the same thing, but it requires actually punishing property crimes, stopping the political justification of theft, and treating private property rights as the foundational principle they are. It’s not complicated. Stop incentivizing bad behavior and you’ll get less of it.