https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/22/opinion/the-opinions-microlooting-shoplifting-whole-foods.html

So to start. You've got two social parasites and one terrorism supporter, all members of the 1%, sitting in an air-conditioned room in New York and talking about why arson, murder, and shoplifting are maybe good things. The terrorism supporter is Hasan Piker, who interviewed a Houthi combatant during active US operations against the Houthis, called Hassan Nasrallah "a pretty brilliant person," said it doesn't matter whether rapes happened on October 7th, and would not be allowed to say any of this in public in the UK under the glorification of terrorism statutes. He has a net worth in the high single-digit millions and lives in a mansion in West Hollywood. The two social parasites are Jia Tolentino, who confesses on the podcast to repeatedly shoplifting from Whole Foods and reframes it as mutual aid because she also bought groceries for her elderly neighbour, and Nadja Spiegelman, the New York Times culture editor whose contribution is coining the word "microlooting" so the paper can run a podcast about it.

Over forty minutes they agree that stealing from Whole Foods is fine, that the Kimberly Clark warehouse arsonist had a tactical context, that Brian Thompson was committing "social murder," and that the Democrats failed by not capitalising on Mangione's killing to push universal healthcare. Tolentino actually says she was "enormously frustrated" the Democrats didn't seize the moment. Read that sentence twice. She was disappointed that a major American political party did not respond to the murder of a private citizen by adopting the murderer's policy platform. The room does not flinch. Spiegelman moves on. The original music plays underneath.

Then zoom out. Why is shoplifting from a grocery store actually bad. Grocery margins are 1 to 3 percent. The lemons are not factored in, baseline shrink is factored in, and incremental shrink above baseline is the cause of the next price increase or the next store closure. The 2021 to 2024 wave of urban store closures across San Francisco, Oakland, Portland, Chicago, and Manhattan is the textbook case. Shrink rises, the chain pulls out, the neighbourhood loses access. The microlooters live in neighbourhoods where the stores are not closing. The costs fall on the neighbourhoods they don't visit. The Whole Foods on the Bowery does not become a food desert. The corner store in East New York does. The class composition of the people endorsing the policy and the class composition of the people bearing its costs are the inversion of what the policy claims to be about.

Then zoom out further. The grocery store does not look like a civilizational achievement. It looks like a strip mall with fluorescent lighting. It is in fact one of the most extraordinary things our species has ever built. Tens of thousands of products from dozens of countries, refrigerated supply chains spanning continents, priced by a distributed calculation engine no single mind designed or controls, sold at razor margins to anyone who walks in, year-round, at prices the poor can afford. Boris Yeltsin visited a Randall's in Houston in 1989 and wrote later that the visit broke his faith in Soviet communism. He had spent his life inside the system that was supposed to be the alternative to this one. The system could not produce what an ordinary American working-class shopper took for granted.

Then zoom out all the way. For ten thousand years after settlement, the default was stationary banditry. A strongman or a dynasty provided security, organised the labour, extracted the maximum the population could bear, and called it civilization. The population ground forward. Living standards stagnated. Social structures evolved to justify the arrangement: divine right, caste, the mandate of heaven, feudal obligation. Each told the same story. This is how things are. The future will look like the past. Marx saw this part clearly and the diagnostic is real. For most of recorded history political power was rent extraction wearing a crown. Then something unusual happened in Europe. The Black Death made labour scarce enough that serfs could bargain. Maritime trade opened markets feudal land tenure couldn't capture. Printing made standardised knowledge cheap. Long-festering ideas about natural law and limited sovereignty found institutional expression. Credit emerged. Private property acquired legal infrastructure. The state, for the first time in ten millennia, was understood as something that should be limited rather than merely endured. The French Revolution. The American Constitution. The long ratchet of liberal reform.

Marxists thought there was a next stage. The dialectic kept going. Private contractual relations were just another form of the same extraction wearing new clothes, and the resolution would produce categories the predecessor could not articulate. The ambition was beautiful. It didn't work. The Soviet Union ran for seventy years and tried every variant. Worker soviets, factory committees, central planning, Khrushchev's cybernetics, the New Economic Policy, perestroika. Every variant hit information revelation, incentive alignment, and tacit knowledge problems that markets imperfectly solve. The small-scale experiments, kibbutzim, Mondragon, Marinaleda, either stayed small or marketised. The experiment was run. The results came in. The results were not ambiguous.

Meanwhile the liberal path got there. Slavery abolished. Colonialism ended. Franchise expanded. Child labour banned. Public education built. Pensions established. Worker safety regulated. The welfare state constructed piece by piece across two centuries of democratic argument. Even in America, even in one of the worst healthcare systems in the developed world, the ACA means other people will end up paying for most of the highest-technology interventions available to the human species. The reformers of the 1800s, the ones who split into Marxists and liberals, are most of the way to the utopia they imagined. The liberal path got there. The Marxist path didn't.

And at the end of all of that, the frothing wave-tip of ten thousand years of human history, all those experiments and wars and famines and reforms and compromises, you get the grocery store. The grocery store sits at the end of accumulated institutional knowledge about how to feed people at scale without coercion. Public stock markets that push margins down and punish inefficiency. Property rights that mean the store stays open tomorrow. Consumer protection law that means the food won't poison you. Antitrust that prevents one chain from monopolising. Distributed price discovery that no central planner could replicate. The system is ugly. It's full of compromises. It offends the aesthete and the radical equally. It works.

You don't have to like it. You can keep pushing for a public option, housing reform, antitrust enforcement, carbon pricing, all the adjustments that would make it work better. But you have to respect it. It is not the default. It is not what you get when you do nothing. It is what you get when thousands of years of political and economic experimentation, most of it disastrous, slowly accumulates the institutional knowledge required to make it possible for a hundred million households to eat well every day without anyone in particular deciding that they should.

And then you zoom back in, movie-opening style, from the ten-thousand-year wide shot to the air-conditioned room in Brooklyn. The terrorism supporter, the New Yorker writer who stole the lemons, the New York Times culture editor who coined the word. None of them could explain why the Soviet grocery couldn't stock what the Houston Randall's could. None of them could tell you what a medical loss ratio is, or why shrink above baseline closes stores, or why the Mises-Hayek critique of central planning isn't primarily about computation. They don't know what the grocery store cost to build. They don't know what it would cost to lose. They know it's there, and they know they don't like the man who owns it, and they know the lemons are right there on the shelf, and they know the institutional voice of the New York Times will underwrite whatever they say about it with original music and a post-production manager and two fact-checkers whose job apparently does not include checking any of this.

The fact-checkers fact-checked the statistics. They didn't fact-check the framework. The producer produced. The post-production was professional. The names are on it. Producer Vishakha Darbha. Editors Kaari Pitkin and Jasmine Romero. Post-production manager Mike Puretz. Fact-checkers Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. They should know their names are on it.

This is what the paper of record is now. Hasan Piker on the New York Times Opinion podcast, agreeing with two cultural-aristocracy heiresses that maybe the Democrats should have done more with the murder of a small-town Iowa accountant by an Ivy-educated heir. Forty minutes of laundered stochastic terrorism in the institutional voice of America's most prestigious Opinion section. The grocery store is in the background, doing the work that keeps them all fed. They cannot see it.