Laws are essential otherwise we'd have all out anarchy, I am not agreeing they are all fair or just just that life would be a lot more difficult trying to live if we didn't have guidelines to live by. Look what is happening out in California after they changed the law that shoplifting would no longer be enforced unless it was over a thousand dollars. Shop owners had to go to arming themselves to protect their shops as people were just walking in and taking stuff and walking back out the door. You gotta watch what you wish for otherwise it can come back and bite you. The essentiality of guidelines can be seen as far back as when Moses wrote the ten commandments.
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There is a significant difference between GOOD LAWS and BAD LAWS.
I'm not suggesting we abolish ALL LAWS.
Are you sure that these were not just a few cases that went shoplifting? In principle, you don't need a book to understand the law, every child learns and knows that you don't steal or cheat others. Not because it is written, but because people make this experience very real. For example, they feel anger about being robbed, and children who observe their parents grieving about a theft learn that the thief acted wrong. But perhaps in the distant past, before there was any thought of possession, there was no such thing, and if someone took something from you without asking, it may not have been stealing, because where there is no sense of wrongdoing, there is no accusation. Perhaps, as I can envision it in my imagination, something that someone else had lying around because he could not yet use it, that is, it was a kind of surplus, would be little or not at all angry if someone who had no surplus had taken something from the one who had more. Without a sense for "mine" something might have been a common good and then one might not even have had the idea to hide the taking away. I think I can vaguely recall a book - I don't know if it was fiction or a field report - that people were observed doing something like this and a simple object had made the rounds in a village, for example, until it ended up back with the one who "owned" it first.
For us "civilized people", such a thing is hardly conceivable, so far removed from our canon of values, so alien. But I find the idea very interesting, because it resonates with something...
It was more than a few cases. I seen a couple news video's on it but here's an article I found.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/california-prop-47-shoplifting-theft-crime-statewide
Your story sounds wonderful but rather unrealistic as most people don't have things laying around that people can wander off with and the chances it will come back is pretty unlikely. The majority of people who have things of value they want to get rid of place it on the curb for people to take, I've done that quite often myself, either that or I take it to the thrift shop around the corner and donate the stuff there. It's the only place in the city where people can go in and show any means to being on any type of social program and get a free bag of clothes every month.