Too good to be true?

El. I stand corrected. You did not propose the theory, you merely described it. I'll respond further off thread, because I don't want to digress any further into a non-audio topic.

I agree with Maineiac and Elizabeth. Eldartford's proposition is an example of the "Broken window theory" in economics. Sometime around 1800, early in the development of economic theory, someone proposed that a broken window was not economically harmful because someone would be hired to fix the window. The common sense rebutal was that, if a broken window was economically beneficial, society would be better if if all windows were broken, which intuitively seems wrong. The sophisicated rebuttal was that the economic activity of fixing the broken window diverts resources that could have been used for some other productive purpose, leaving society less well off than if the window had not been broken in the first place.

The criminal redistribution of wealth also overlooks the economic cost of living in a lawless society, which discourages wealth generating activity and keeps total societal wealth from increasing, if not actually causing it to decrease. And that's only the economic cost. There's a significant social cost as well. In Eldartford's example, the only persons who are better off are the thief and the person who persuaded someone to pay for a 2 volume thesis on how the rest of society is benefitted.