Legalized Stealing: The American Way of Life is an exercise in economic theorizing that uses a conversational exposition laced with whimsy and badinage to present a serious examination of the American economic system. From two hard principles that embrace micro and macro economic phenomena comes the idea that private property in one's labor is the archetypal intervention into the free-market society. Labor-oriented private property is taken as the standard for judging the merit of all interventions, leading to a broad-spectrum analysis of what is wrong and right in these matters and what can be done to purge the bad and multiply the good.