Too good to be true?

Wrong, Bigjoe! If you unknowingly purchase stolen merchandise, and it is somehow later discovered to be stolen, it is returned to the owner, and now YOU must try to get reimbursed from the seller! Good luck, if he was the lowlife who stole it or fenced it. And unfortunately, most thefts are committed to support a drug habit.

Eldartford, a stolen $400- TV will probably bring the thief $50- from a fence, who will then sell it for $100-. These items are kept in "inventory" for as short a time as possible...for obvious reasons!

Fatparrot...Perhaps the prices I quoted were a bit off, but the general idea should be clear. The professional fence has accounting techniques to keep his "inventory" looking clean. Incidentally, the fence's and thief's universally agreed reference standard for pricing items at the time the research was done was the Sears catalog, and the fence's payment was a standard percentage of the retail price of the comparable item in the catalog. Of course there is no Sears catalog anymore, so they must have come up with another method.

Okay, so because somebody- or a large group of "somebodys"-benefits under the stolen goods/ fence scenario, it's okay?

A few names for you to ponder: Enron. Global Crossing. MCI.

I'm a blatant, unrepentant capitalistic free market nutcase. The fence, however, is engaging in CRIME.

some of you guys have watched way too many episodes of csi on tv,pawn shops are a legit business & come across high end gear constantly,ebay is full of pawn shop high $$$ gear.

killer deals never wait on super sleuths.

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.