Property Is Theft?

Proudhon’s rabid and raging cry against capitalism, “property is theft,” has echoed from its original utterance in the 19th century into the 21st. Now found both online and on placards at rallies, it has escaped its anarchist environs and burrowed its way into mainstream thinking in blue states like California and New York, where increasingly high taxes on the rich are supposedly ushering in a new age of justice.

But a sober analysis of our society reveals that theft—or its close cousin, the replacement of high quality by something inferior—now drive both the economy and the culture. That pesky commandment (number seven according to Catholicism) etched on the stone tablets carried down the mountain by Moses is defunct.

What catalyzed my thinking on this issue was reading a March 27, 2026, Wall Street Journal article about Mikey Shulman, cofounder of the artificial intelligence (AI) music platform Suno. The writer of the article, Katherine Sayre, describes how Suno and similar juggernauts scrape the internet for music in order for their AI to learn and then spew out “new” music. To many people, including me, that sounds like theft and cheating. But it seems like a logical progression from what has been happening to all us consumers for many years now: companies (retailers, etc.) have been taking our data and repaying us with…points? “Rewards?” Loyalty programs?

Let us not be naïve. There are numerous examples in our culture and in others of borrowing, imitation, and even outright copying. We live in a fallen world where people through the ages and throughout the world have chosen to make use of the work of others for their own purposes. But God is Truth, and He confronts individuals via their conscience.

Think of King Solomon and his wise judgment about the child claimed by two women. The true mother relinquished her claim in order to spare the child’s life, for he was in fact her child. Or consider the Samaritan woman: Christ gives her a chance to lie, but she instead confesses her sinful life. These are but two examples of God confronting individual people about the truth. It is about theft on a human scale.

What we instead have today is theft on an inhuman scale: artificial intelligence is manifestly not human, and it is being used to steal from artists and content creators in order to make profits for those who deploy the AI. Corporations are vehicles for harvesting data from consumers to feed into algorithms in an effort to target people and market them what they probably don’t need.

The same corporations are guilty of replacing content by celebrated authors with substandard fare. I have in mind the movie giants that allowed Peter Jackson to excise the chapter in The Return of the King considered by many key to understanding the whole arc of The Lord of the Rings: “The Scouring of the Shire.” Or how Amazon pursued profits by producing atrocious adaptations of Tolkien’s posthumously-published tales from earlier ages of Middle Earth.

I have mostly focused on the commercial aspects of today’s theft culture. What does the Church have to say on the matter? There is the Seventh Commandment, which states: “You shall not steal” (Exodus 20:15, RSV). There are admonitions against false measures: “Diverse weights are an abomination to the LORD, and false scales are not good” (Proverbs 20:23, RSV).

In Acts 5, St. Luke recounts the tragedy of Ananias and Sapphira, and how they were struck dead for withholding proceeds from the sale of their property and lying about it. In the final chapters of Revelation, Jesus tells John that “every one who loves and practices falsehood” will be left outside the new heavens (22:15, RSV). Finally, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, in 2407ff, goes into detail about theft.

The issue of theft of our Faith patrimony comes up in conversations with my wife, a cradle Catholic who came back to the Church only in her 50s. What the modern Church has stolen from us, often by hiding it or forgetting it, but sometimes by changing it, includes: The Latin language (Veterum Sapientia of John XXIII; Sacrosanctum Concilium of Vatican II, especially 36.1); clear moral teaching; and “hard” verses from the Bible.

We have also allowed the culture to steal from the Church’s storehouse (our Catholic birthright) the following:

• The rainbow (Genesis 9:13-17), intended to be a beautiful sign to mankind after the flood that God would never again destroy the world by a global flood. The rainbow has been stolen from mankind by the advocates of the sin of Sodom and their associated perverts.
• The name Christian by “evangelicals.” For centuries before the Luciferian revolt of Fr. Martin Luther, “Christian” meant one who adhered to the teachings of the Church as it saw fit to define them. In the 20th century especially, Protestants decided that only they were entitled to use the name Christian according to whatever their particular sect called the truth.
• The proper image of woman by feminism. Thankfully, we have had both Alice von Hildebrand and Carrie Gress speaking out against this effort to redefine what makes a woman a woman.

The yippie radical Abbie Hoffman wrote a book titled Steal This Book. Was he prescient in that? Is the answer to not have private and intellectual property? The Catholic tradition has clearly answered that question in favor of private property, provided it is understood that ownership is not the highest good.

Can we do anything? Pope Leo has spoken on the topic of AI, and it is rumored that he has a major piece of writing prepared for promulgation, writing that may take aim at AI and its potential to harm humanity. We also have historical examples to follow: the Church declared that the Council held in Ephesus in 449 was invalid and null, defining it as a “robber council.”

But above all those examples are the promises of Christ, who assures us He will be with us until the end of the ages and beyond. He is preparing a place for us. Once in Heaven, nothing will ever again be stolen from us.