Steven Landsberg has really really odd OpEd in MSNBC where he tries to provide a generalized defense of the looting in Iraq:

Start with the economics. It’s not immediately obvious that theft does diminish wealth. If you steal my bicycle, I’m one bicycle poorer, but you’re one bicycle richer. Average wealth hasn’t changed. No resources have been lost; they’ve just changed hands. The economic objection to theft doesn’t kick in until your thievery starts distracting you from productive activities. If I’ve already got a bicycle, and you spend a day building a bicycle, we end up with two bicycles between us. If instead you spend your day plotting to steal my bicycle, we end up with just one bicycle between us. That’s a bad outcome.

Now that's just plain ignorant of many classic rules in economics -- particularly Coase's theory of the firm.   Some assets (for ex., hospital beds) are more valuable when they are coupled with other assets (for ex., hospitals).   The opposite situation is when an asset is more valuable when coupled with someone else's asset -- resulting in a divestiture or just plain old sale.  If the owners of the asset don't budge and if the asset is WAY more valuable somewhere else, you get a hostile takeover.

Steven takes a very superficial view of wealth and confuses it with an asset base.   The asset base -- supply of bicycles -- hasn't changed; what has changed is the net social level of utility being gained from those bicycles.   It's fair to presume that the previous / true owner valued the use of a bicycle much more highly -- cuz he paid for it -- than some random looter.

This net utility is what constitutes wealth.   The biggest problem with the looting in Baghdad then, is that it is disaggregating assets -- regardless of whether they were aggregated using market or non-market forces.  Assets in a disaggregated form are generally less valuable than properly aggregated ones....

(While on the topic of looting, I think the media is placing WAY too much attention on this problem for their own private, Western/War-Loathing reasons.   As far as war goes, the looting of Baghdad has been TRIVIAL relative to previous conflicts.  Dare we even start to compare what happened to Baghdad -- by it's own citizenry no less -- to what the Iraqis did to Kuwait?   Or what the Baathists did to the people for 30 years?   VDH provided the best treatment of this issue I've seen to date here.)