Via Glenn Reynolds' link, my attention was drawn to an absolutely monstrous device which instantly makes barcodes for whatever item you might want, at whatever price you might set.

Ichiku's Barcode Magic can be used to generate your own custom pricing labels for whatever price you choose. Since most barcodes use a uniform system, it isn't that difficult to make something expensive -- say, an iPod -- cost just a five-spot.

Or, in the case of the fake barcode labels, forgery.

But everyone is operating under the assumption that barcodes on store items would necessarily be altered for personal gain. Would they?

Suppose a group of activists decided that the best way to hurt a given company was to deliberately misprice it's product line, and they went into stores and simply stuck incorrect barcodes onto the targeted product line. There are plenty of things that a lot of people think should not be sold, and there are plenty of companies (and store chains) considered evil. I don't think examples are needed. Would that be forgery? Depends on the forgery statute; some of them require that there be some intent to acheive personal gain, while some don't. (A subject discussed extensively during Ra^thergate.) Is it more noble to alter one's driver's license to get into the military than to get into a nightclub?

While the answer to the last one is obvious, what makes the deliberate harming of a product line or a store chain morally superior to saving a few bucks on a pack of razor blades? Is it because the latter is selfish, while harming a store in the name of a cause is "altruistic"? I'm a bit puzzled, and quite frankly, if I owned the company which was being hurt this way, I'd see the activists as infinitely more evil than the ordinary thief. Society (and the courts) see otherwise, and that's because of a thing we call "moral authority."

Because moral authority invests people with a right (at least in their minds) to do evil in the name of good, I think it is arguably more evil than an honestly acknowledged ordinary criminal motive. History shows that far more harm has been done by people who believed that their moral authority erases ordinary guilt.

Back in the 1970s, even theft was considered morally virtuous, provided the thief was a leftist, and called his theft the "liberation" of an item. (Abbie Hoffman's Steal This Book explains why.) And even today, responsible journalists sometimes claim that robberies committed by poor people are morally superior to lies told by the well-off.

I'm sure that certain morally superior deconstructionists would claim that all morality is fraud (a fraudulent social construct of whatever sort), but, then, isn't such a claim necessarily predicated on morality? If so, then isn't it just another form of fraud, cloaked with self-canceling moral superiority?

MORE: Raging Bee's comment below highlights the fact that barcodes are not necessarily prices; they're often codes for items. Which means that mispricing an item would require mislabeling that item.