California Walmart Forced to Lockup Steaks, Ground Beef.

California likes to think of itself as the future.

It is one of the most progressive states in America—a place that prides itself on always moving forward.

Yet a recent video from a California Walmart exposes the absurdity of that claim: everyday products are now being locked in cages.

Including steaks.

Not a metaphorical cage. An actual metal security device wrapped around a package of beef to keep people from stealing it.

The shoplifters, meanwhile, remain considerably less confined.

There’s something almost too perfect about the image. The steak has been arrested. It will remain in custody until an honest citizen pays its bail.

And while California may be one of the most visible examples, too much of the country is moving in the same direction.

Regression rarely announces itself with a grand collapse. It arrives as one more inconvenience everyone is expected to accept. The deodorant is locked up. The toothpaste is behind glass. The restroom requires a code. The store closes earlier. The shopping cart’s wheels seize at the edge of the parking lot.

Now a simple steak comes in its own jail cell.

But it isn’t only the expensive cuts. The same video shows metal cages wrapped around packages of ground beef—one of the most ordinary products in the meat aisle.

Ground beef.

Another lock. Another cage. Another small surrender.

How long until it’s something as inexpensive as gum?

Every theft creates a cost, and that cost doesn’t disappear when the thief walks out the door. It is distributed among everyone else.

People once understood this. Theft is not victimless simply because the immediate victim is a large corporation.

Customers pay through higher prices. They pay by waiting for employees to unlock ordinary products. They pay through reduced selection, closed stores and simple errands made slower and more degrading.

Retailers spend money on cages, cameras, guards and security systems instead of better service, more employees or lower prices.

This is the hidden tax of disorder.

The honest majority is forced to live inside a security system built for the dishonest minority—all because government can’t, or won’t, perform its most basic job: maintaining order.

So we secure the merchandise and inconvenience the honest customer. We make normal life worse because confronting thieves has become politically suspect, physically dangerous or legally risky.

That isn’t progress. It is surrender.

California preaches progress louder than any state in America. Look at what its promised utopia has delivered: merchandise behind bars, shoplifters free to walk and honest people handed the bill.

California is not alone. Across too many blue states and cities, everyday life is moving backward—one lock, one cage, one shuttered store at a time.

Rock bottom rarely announces its arrival.

Or perhaps it does—in the form of a picture.

Of a steak.

In jail.