Laws, Norms and Shopping Carts
27th July 2013
David Friedman ponders the distinction between laws and social norms.
You observe a stranger, in public, in possession of what is obviously stolen property of significant value. You might ignore it, but you also might call the police.
Unless it’s a shopping cart. The value of a shopping cart is about a hundred dollars and any that you observe outside the grocery and associated parking lot are almost certainly stolen. Yet, in practice, you do not call the police. My guess is that practically nobody does—or that the police don’t come, or that if they come they make no effort to arrest the thief. The basis for that guess is casual observation—if there were any significant chance that walking off with a shopping cart would get you arrested, tried, and jailed with a sentence suited to the value of the cart, very few people would do it.