Nobody is stealing anything. What they don't realize is that the free market will incentivize people to liberate your valuables into the private sector when gains are better than the potential losses. It's just simple economics.
Obviously facetious, but "stealing" is not some axiomatic boolean that never changes. It's judged differently by different societies depending on time, circumstances, and ideas.
"Raiding" employees was common place. Now there are non-raid agreements. If non-raid agreements became very ubiquitous it would be considered stealing.
Working employees 100 hour weeks with no overtime was commonplace. Now there are labor laws. It would be considered wage theft and exactly "stealing" if you did it today.
"Simple economics" gives you no guidelines to judge any of these things "stealing" or "not stealing".