Flippanarchy

You have the most important part flipped.

The authority we give the government is not to provide services. The authority is to collect taxes, which are used to provide services.

Anyone can provide services, but not anyone can collect taxes. The government can only collect taxes because we gave them the power to do so.

Without taxes, the government cannot provide the services. A lazy asshole that avoids paying taxes is preventing the government from providing more services, even if he "gave them power".

The case of the "lazy asshole" is not one in which he needs to steal food to survive. The case is of a perfectly capable person that could be doing literally anything to earn an income, but chooses not to, since stealing is easier. Even if he has an income, he may prefer spending his money on more expensive luxury goods, since he can save a lot of money by just stealing the food.

By doing so, he's being incredibly antisocial in multiple ways:

• Stealing is done without the knowledge of the shop. Which means that it is harder for them to keep track of inventory. Requiring more effort means that the price will go up (for the people that don't steal).
• Shops don't just suffer the loss. If an item is often stolen, they'll just increase the price to make up for it. For everyone that doesn't steal.
• If a shop chooses to suffer the loss instead, the thief is directly stealing from the shop (as opposed to everyone else). How is that fair in any way? The shop might even go out of business.
• It hurts the actual people that need the food: some people will be angry (for the reasons above) and will probably blame the people that need it. Might even jump to the conclusion of "why do we have social programs for them if they're gonna steal anyway?".
• It erodes trust in general. Everyone benefits if everyone behaves correctly. I don't think I need to argue why. In this case specifically, shops wouldn't need to implement anti-theft measures if nobody stole. It would be a waste of resources.
• It's even worse if you steal from another person directly or a small shop instead of a big shop. For multiple reasons.
  • It does psychological harm. Maybe the food owner had plans for that food, so now he has to make new plans, or even worse, go make another trip to the store to buy more food.
  • It lowers the stock. Which combined with the difficulty to keep track of inventory, might result in an item going out of stock. Preventing everyone else from buying it.
  • If it was home cooked, it might've been cooked as a gift for someone else. Increasing the psychological harm.

I could go on. But I believe this is more than enough to get the point across.

When something is stolen, society doesn't just lose the value of the item. A 1€ item being stolen might be a loss of 10€ for society.

There's 2 choices:

• Literally everyone gets provided with the basic needs by the government.
• Only the people that are unable (not unwilling, important) to pay for basic needs gets them provided by the government.

Both cases should remove hunger as a problem. Only in case 2 would the lazy assholes be hungry. But being hungry should be motivation enough to work at least the bare minimum. Which means nobody would be.

What both cases have in common is: nobody has the need to steal food. Therefore, it should not be allowed, neither legally nor morally, due to it being incredibly antisocial and expensive.

The solution to hunger is not "let them steal". It is "give them food".