Vin Suprynowicz

I grew up in a different country.

In the suburbs in the 1950s, kids I grew up with can remember their moms putting greenback dollars in plain white envelopes, writing on those envelopes “Insurance man” or “Milkman,” and sticking the envelopes to the refrigerator door with little magnets.

Later in the day, when no one was home, those men would enter the house through the unlocked kitchen door and take the moneys owed them. No one ever worried that they, or anyone in the neighborhood, would steal anything from the unlocked house.

On a trip to the store in the center of town, occasionally a tyke too young to know better would pick up a small toy and carry it out to the car. Arriving home, mom and dad would ask each other who’d paid for the small item. Once it was revealed that no one had paid, the family would dutifully travel the two miles back to the store so the toy could be returned with a tearful apology.

How many young parents would do that today? Some. But how many would say, instead, “Serves ‘em right! That store charges too much, in the first place. And they figure this kind of loss into their pricing, anyway. So we finally came out ahead, for once”?

During the flush times, those who were doing well enough to shop at the upscale stores where you got a personal salesgal or salesguy may have missed the change. Now that the federal government is blocking an economic correction as surely as Hoover and Roosevelt did throughout the 1930s, though, now that hard times are driving a lot of the formerly middle class to shop thrift stores and second hand malls, it’s right there in your face.

It’s not just the surveillance cameras, the portals that beep if you try to carry something out of the store — though all those things cost money and that cost is passed on in the prices we all pay. Note the signs that say “Items without price tags will not be sold.” Note the way the thrift shops write the prices of second-hand shoes and coats on shoe soles and inside coat collars in indelible black marker. Note the ever larger, stickier, harder-to-remove price labels that can essentially ruin the resale value of books and all kinds of other products. Why are they doing that?

Because today’s shoppers will switch the price tag of a cheaper item onto a more expensive one if they can get away with it. They’ll rip off and hide a price tag, offer a lesser sum at the cash register, hope the busy cashier will say “Yeah, sure, whatever.”

Why are so many things locked up in glass cases? Why is only one boot of an expensive pair left out to try? Because too many of them “walk out the door.” Try to tackle or shoot down such a thief, and today it’s the PROPRIETOR who’s likely to be charged with a crime.

Are the majority of American shoppers “thieves of opportunity”? Not yet, or every retail establishment would look like those inner-city gun, jewelry or liquor stores, with concertina wire, buzz-in doors, and sales staff openly toting holstered sidearms.

But we’re getting there, and fast. The biggest frustration for retailers isn’t even the fact they have to factor into their pricing a certain percentage to cover such “inventory shrinkage.” It’s the knowledge that even that one time in a hundred when you might actually catch such a scumbag red-handed, there’s nothing to be done.

Grab them by the collar, slam them to the floor, sit on them till someone can call the cops and press charges? “Was the item worth more than $500? He says that’s the price tag that was on there when he picked it up. OK, but you’ll have to come down to court, probably three or four times, you’ll lose a half-day of work each time. Then, unless it’s like the 8th or 12 provable offense, the judge’ll let him go with a slap on the wrist, release to his mom’s supervision. By the way, he’s saying you hurt him and he’s going to sue.”

Is it any wonder struggling proprietors, nearly bankrupted in the first place by jacked-up taxes and parasitical regulators, lie awake at night fabricating fantasies that feature Clint Eastwood and a .44 magnum?

The courts are clogged with “more important” stuff, you see. But I was born in a different country; a country where no one thought they had a right to a better life based on stealing other people’s stuff.

I happened to catch a few minutes of Dr. Dean Edell on the radio the other day. He said the reason people oppose Obamacare is that they want top-notch health care but they don’t want to pay for it.

That’s exactly backwards. When I was a kid most people DID want to pay for their health care. They might only be able to pay the doctor with fresh eggs from their hens, or by sending him five dollars a month, but they paid.

The last time I went in for a routine diagnostic test they asked me if I wanted it done in the doctor’s office or in the nearby hospital. I asked, “Which is cheaper?” The answer — I kid you not — was “What do you care? The insurance is paying, either way.”

They told me I was the only patient they could remember who insisted on knowing which was cheaper.

And I have private insurance. At least indirectly I “pay for my own health care.” Imagine what the incentive is for an American on Medicare or Medicaid to argue, “I’m not sure I need all these tests and treatments; this must be costing a fortune; what’s the cheapest way to go?”

No incentive at all. So doctors do 25 percent more than they really need to, just to cover their butts against a lawsuit. Then they’re forced to jack up their charges by another 25 percent to pay all the clerks they have to hire to “negotiate” with the big insurance companies — the biggest of which “insurance companies” are called “Medicare” and “Medicaid.” Then the government, backed by armed tax collectors, tells the doctors and hospitals they’re only going to be paid 80 percent — no, 70 percent — no, 60 percent of their costs, and declares “costs have been reduced.”

Costs have not been reduced. The medical profession just shifts those costs to the ever-fewer free-market patients. Then — this is the best part — the politicians scream “These greedy medicos are raising their prices through the roof, despite our best efforts at cost-containment! Clearly there’s a need for more direct government control!

They’re peeling the price stickers off $3 items, and sticking them on $10 items, and pretending “Costs have been reduced.” And we’re surprised teen-age kids thinks it’s all giggly fun to do the same in the retail stores, with a “get out of jail free” card even if they’re caught?

“You can’t do anything to me. My daddy’s a lawyer and if you touch me, I’ll sue. Your prices are too high, anyway. You’re just greedy; all this stuff should be free to the people, anyway. You can’t prove a thing! I’ve got a right to free health care. I’ve got a right to free stuff. It’s part of my human dignity. Teacher says.”

You think I’m making this up? You think kids in the schools today are taught by their socialist union schoolmarms the marvels of capitalism, that it’s because capitalists without a clue who you are, acting in their own “greedy self-interest,” grow fruit in Chile and sell it to somebody who ships it to Long Beach and sells it to some trucker who hauls it here and sells it to some grocer that we can eat fresh fruit in February, a thing our grandparents could never dream of — and that relentless competition will drive them out of business if someone else can get fresher fruit here and sell it for a nickel less?

They’re not. They’re taught they have a “right” to “affordable” food, luxury housing, and medical care, with “affordable” meaning “practically free, because government will make the greedy rich pay for it” — with no competition to hold down the vigorish.

Yes, “luxury.” In most of the world, an unmarried mom living in spacious privacy with her kids in an apartment which features indoor plumbing, central heat and air conditioning, a telephone and a color TV is living in undreamed-of luxury.

But you know what? It’s coming to an end. The pendulum is about to start swinging the other way, and the thing about pendulums is they don’t generally stop when they get back to “a reasonable middle ground.” Some of us will live to see corpses hanging from light poles in front of retail stores, with signs pinned to their chests reading “Thief said he / would sue us.” Some of us will live to see tax men and central bankers who lived off treasure looted from the productive class by stealing our savings and replacing them with funny money suffer similar fates.

Because you don’t have a “right” to peel a $3 price tag off a marked-down science fiction paperback and stick it on a $10 record album and giggle and pretend you’ve “lowered prices.” You don’t have a “right” to hire armed men to take everything the productive, capitalist class has worked to earn and save, and spread it around to enhance your own sense of power.

And I’ll tell you how you’re going to find that out. Not when they stop re-electing you, but you still get your fat pension. No. The way you’re going to find out is, when the mob shows up with a rope.

Is that a threat? No more than it’s a threat to say “Kids who play in traffic will eventually get hurt.” I hope all these thieves get religion and change their ways. But I wouldn’t bet on it.