Italian court rules food theft 'not a crime' if hungry

This I agree. In fact, I am of the strong opinion that there should be very hard limits set on the ownership of certain types of properties (e.g. land, water, food). No one should be allowed to own any of such properties beyond a certain limit. [1] But once a person who owns whatever is allowed by the laws, then the law should protect the ownership of that person of that property and in case any person (needy or not-so-needy) steals such a property of other person, the law must not then take a populist u-turn to tell us grandiose sounding principles like "life has greater value than property". If the judge wants to show he/she is so "humane", he/she should pay for the loss of the owner and allow the "needy" poor to keep the food.

Some other better ways the judge could have taken: The judge could have ordered the officials overseeing the welfare matters and could have ordered them to compensate for the losses sustained by the owner. In fact, the judge had a very good opportunity to bring to the notice of that poor hungry person some of the welfare schemes that are set in place by the society.

But saying that a theft, which has caused damage to other law abiding citizen, is not a crime is not only ludicrous but is also dangerous.

>>Others would find it ultimately antithetical to society overall to threaten people with prison for a theft like in this case. I certainly would.

I am not against the society helping the needy people to survive but there are other "not-so-antithetical-to-democracy" ways of helping the needy people than just ignoring the thefts carried out by the needy people.

What was wrong on the part of the owner? Why he/she was punished? These are some very important issues here. We must not fall prey to sentiments like "thefts of food by poor hungry is okay and anyway the shop owner is always that dirty-rich person who needs to be punished".

[1] Note about private property: please note that I am not saying/suggesting that we should embrace the communist style anti-people tyrannical systems which prohibit "most"* people from owing any private property. Of course, the communists allow only the "more equal people" [2] (e.g. party chairman and his cronies in polit-bureau and few of their cronies in turn) to own almost all of the property. The "party-people" are allowed to have as much fun as they want and at whatever troubles such fun-acts of the party-people cause to other "less equal" people, the communists just ignore.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Farm

The closest thing would be say primitive hunter gatherer societies. Ever since we started having specialists that paid for their decreased production by providing greater fitness for society as a whole benefit from society has only been tangentially related to utility provided.

The creation of such a society wherein value is so related would be such a profound improvement over every society in existence wherein value seems to derive from leverage not value that it not ethical implications would surely be the primary topic of discussion.

In a bizarrely unfair real society arguing that you have the right to maximally leverage whatever value you your dad and your grandpa managed to drag away and coral seems greedy and disingenuous.

Devoting a minority of societies resources to ensure everyone has something so that they can find their own way to contribute seems to be the only sane solution to an otherwise broken system.

Secondly you mention drug companies and specifically their intellectual property in the same breath as speaking of protecting a man's ability to freely go about providing value to society but ip is a wholly artificial construct and designed to shape how value is distributed disproportionately not to empower creation of value but to empower others to extract rent from society something that seems antithetical to your own desires.

You are concerned with the government taxing and spending on handouts but not about enabling monopolies that have no basis in reality or the notion of property rights. If I have a right to my chemistry set surely if I make the right molecule my property doesn't become yours.

Basically Objectivism is a great way for those who have historically controlled the Lions share of a societies resources while providing minimal value to society in return to justify their greed.

I agree, basic income is the answer. But this judgement isn't logical or sound.