Describing the “den of infamous resort” where Old Joe, Mrs. Dilber, and others haggled over things pilfered from the possessions of Ebenezer Scrooge, Charles Dickens called that “beetling shop” a place where “iron, old rags, bottles, bones, and greasy offal were bought. Upon the floor within were piled up heaps of rusty keys, nails, chains, hinges, files, scales, weights, and refuse iron of all kinds.” When Dickens wrote in 1843, the metal of choice was iron. 181 years later, it seems to be copper.

The New York Times recently reported (here) on how parts of American cities are going dark because thieves are stealing copper wire. Las Vegas and environs have supposedly lost 970,000 feet of wire. Los Angeles claimed almost 7,000 cases of copper wire theft in the past fiscal year.

Copper closed Tuesday at $4.16/lb. Its price had mostly stayed in the $3-4/lb. range for the past 15 years though, in the last four, it’s hovered between $3.50-$5. Still, it takes a lot of wire to make a pound. Other metals, like brass and bronze, pay less by the pound but generally come in bigger blocks, like cemetery markers. Yes, they’re being stolen, too (though not as much as street lamp wiring). And you thought grave robbers only roamed the Pyramids!

And, in case there are still any Old Joes out there, iron still has a constituency. True, it garners only about 4-10¢/lb but, hey, one fire hydrant or manhole cover weighs more and probably takes less thieving time than stripping a streetlight. And, yes, American cities are suffering hydrant theft which — as the Times notes — like dark nocturnal streets endanger urbanites.

Metal theft even results in people getting killed, as I observed in May (blog post here). Soap opera actor Johnny Wactor was murdered when he encountered three men trying in the middle of the night to steal his car so they could strip its catalytic converter for rare metals.

The Times blames multiple factors. COVID closures pushed many on-the-brink businesses like scrap metal dealers over the brink. Then the Biden Administration came along with its electric vehicle and other environmental mandates, things that require a lot more conductive copper. Demand outpaces supply, leading to shortages. Sure, there’s a whole range of social justice issues here. But I have questions.

First, are there really that many people so poor they need to pillage street lamps or pull up fire hydrants? Yes, I know there are indigent and homeless who rummage trash cans for recyclables, especially returnable cans and bottles in states that impose deposits. (Those deposits were often instituted on the claim that they would encourage recycling but, especially in an inflationary period, how often are they just another free quasi-tax revenue for the government? (See here.) I grew up next to where my hometown decided to build its high school. As a kid, I remember scouring the construction site for cans, knowing metal fetched a certain price. But, after a huge three-hour effort got $2 (granted, $2 in 1971 but still, two bucks), my can collecting days were over.

Second, have we so lost a sense of the common good that stealing fire hydrants is deemed OK? Have we so failed to transmit and inculcate the idea that my community also has needs (not to say also “rights”) even as I think I do?

There is always the danger that community property becomes both everybody’s and nobody’s property. Behind the Iron Curtain, people would steal construction materials from state sites because there was no other way to get bricks or metal to fix your house or build your church. There’s a scene in “Dr. Zhivago” where Yuri Zhivago’s father-in-law rips down a board the local party committee has nailed across the door of his country villa, announcing its expropriation in “the name of the people,” by declaring “well, I’m one of the people, too!” (There’s also a scene where Yuri’s brother, the policeman Yevgraf, sees him furtively tearing slats off an old fence to have something to burn for heat, eliciting his comment, “I told myself it was beneath my dignity, for pilfering firewood is beneath the dignity of any man… [But] one man desperate for a bit of fuel is pathetic, five million people desperate for fuel will destroy a city.” That, too, recalls Dickens’s “Christmas Carol,” particularly the two waifs hiding beneath the Ghost of Christmas Present’s gown, one named “Want”). On the other hand, while socialist housing blocs were well-taken care of within the tiny apartments allotted to a family, common areas — the vestibules, the halls, the sidewalks — often suffered neglect. They’re not mine! The sense of ownership — individual and communal — is not a corruption of capitalism or something that real Christianity should dispense with. (See here.) For the ordinary person, it’s a sense necessary to ensuring your rights, my rights, and our rights and responsibilities.

Third, in the most desperate circumstances (which are rarely encountered in the United States) the claim of common use might tolerate the taking of something essential to survival (e.g., a loaf of bread, not a catalytic converter). But even here some sense of decency is required. Taking a dead man’s grave marker is not decent.

Paradoxically, when Mrs. Dilber tries to shed the embarrassment she and two other thieves initially feel when they meet at Old Joe’s, she writes it off as impersonalness. “The loss of a few things like these” is no harm to a dead man, she insists. Besides, if he had wanted to protect them, he’d have been “more natural” during his life so as not to end it alone and untended. “It’s a judgment on him.” Today’s thief flips the question: Precisely because the marker belongs to a dead man unknown to them, its loss (and the decedent’s consequent greater anonymity) is deemed no compelling “loss” for the deceased. (In both cases, it’s the thief’s gain.)

Mrs. Dilber’s embarrassment, like Yuri Zhivago’s furtive fence slats theft (remember he hides them under his coat), are good things: they testify to consciences that still sense something is wrong. Not only is Mrs. Dilber a thief but she and her confederates know they are able to be thieves because they abuse trust, because they have more intimate access to Scrooge’s life by virtue of their positions (cleaner, laundress, junior undertaker). Similarly, Zhivago is not just embarrassed that a leading physician has to steal firewood but, more so, that he is doing this. Remember, too, that when he returns to his house (now a common dwelling for 13 families) outright looting of his belongings is afoot with no embarrassment. That theft stops only because Yevgraf the policeman enters, striking fear in the would-be thieves. Those morally obtuse dead souls seem more akin to the thieves who steal a block’s fire hydrant (or two or three).

Fourth, who to hold accountable? Our society wavers. Some say the thief, others say the buyer. Some excuse the thief because of his “life circumstances.” Others don’t want to burden the buyer to authenticate the provenance of scrap. In general, I’d demand both assume responsibility. Theft is theft: it’s almost always a function of what I do, not why I did it. Contending otherwise is to erode the concept of rights and responsibility and the human dignity that flows from them, phenomena our society is experiencing. So, the thief should be held to account. But so should the scrap metal dealer. A typical thief might plausibly have an iron bed frame to sell; a fire hydrant, not so much.

The 17^th century English Protestant Robert South said, “Guilt upon the conscience, like rust upon iron, both defiles and consumes it, gnawing and creeping into it, as that does which at last eats out the very heart and substance of the metal.” How much worse is the corrosion when there’s little guilt? And what does fire hydrant theft say about our moral rust?