"Thou shalt not steal."

I've been reading about looting and watching the pictures from New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. So here's my question: Do you think New Orleans would be better off right now if its public school system had taught all students the Ten Commandments as part of their secular education? Or would such forthright exposure to religious indoctrination have so traumatized the little darlings that they might – oh, say – loot the city at the very first opportunity?

The political left in America has never been able to overcome its touchy-queasy aversion to all things God. Make that the Judeo-Christian God. The occult is fine. Islam is fine. Buddha is fine. In fact, anything but the Bible God is fine. Well, as the pictures coming out of New Orleans demonstrate, there is a real-life price to be paid for America's failure to teach the rules of the social contract. Unfortunately, the bill often comes due at the most inconvenient time. And it's not always payable in money alone.

The left's touchy-queasy aversion even extends to common-sense Bible topics that would help students understand and prosper in America, topics such as the Ten Commandments. For how can one understand the difference between a legal system where the king's word is law, and a legal system that holds the king to account for breaking the law? Lex Rex. Good luck in explaining it without God and the widely held belief that even the king is subject to God's law. Without Lex Rex you'll soon be licking another tyrant's boots. For that has been the condition of the bulk of mankind throughout the bulk of human history. Public school teachers take note.

Aside from being something that Christians and Jews are obliged to honor "because God said so," the seventh commandment – "Thou shalt not steal" – just makes plain good sense for everyone. A society depends upon each member doing his or her part to produce something of value. These items are then traded among producers (which we all are, often using money as an intermediary) to the benefit of everyone. We are free to become specialists of a sort, our craft and our products improve, and everyone benefits. Well, everyone except the thieves, who are constrained from practicing their "craft" by the strong moral condemnation of parents, teachers and, ultimately, police and jails.

A prosperous society can be built upon thrift – it can't be built upon theft. (Having said that, I suppose an enterprising economist somewhere will get a government grant to write a paper "proving" that those who steal from society ultimately contribute more to it than actual producers because of all the police, judges, lawyers and welfare workers who are hired by the state to "manage" the perpetrator's "illness." Note that such economists are not producers, they are con-men, which is to say slick-talking thieves.)

A society based on theft – regardless of the pathetic moralizations that leftists, socialists and communists devise to support it – can never be prosperous. There's two reasons why: First, theft deprives the industrious of the fruits of their labor, by taking what they produce without giving anything of value in return. It discourages them, and they reduce or cease production. Second, that same theft deprives society of the industriousness the thief should have contributed by producing something.?

But of course, what is all that when compared to the trauma a child experiences upon exposure in the public school system to concrete rules indicating what's right and wrong?