Tim Lee thinks so, and you might agree with him.

In college, I had a friend who occasionally shoplifted. I wasn’t shy about voicing my disapproval of this practice, and I would have cut off friendship with him if he kept doing it. This anti-shoplifting norm benefits everyone. The stigma against shoplifting is a much more powerful, and less costly, check on the behavior than anything that happens in the formal legal system.

I had a friend who did something very similar — he would order burgers from a — and I did cut off the friendship. So I can relate to Tim’s sentiments.

I still think that voluntary defaults are different. There is a penalty for walking away from a mortgage in your contract, namely surrendering the equity that you’ve built up. And my guess is that the practice will actually lead to a healthier mortgage market, in which banks demand bigger down payments.

In 2008, Nicole Gelinas of the Manhattan Institute wrote an excellent op-ed on the rise of “mortgage walkers,” and she suggested that there was an upside to the phenomenon.

Yes, this behavior is new — but only when it comes to houses. Americans have long been able to cut their losses from bad investments and start over. It stands to reason that when the market made houses into yet another speculative investment, Americans would do the same. Borrowers acted rationally in response to market forces and incentives during the bubble: Buy a house because prices always go up; you can’t lose. Many are acting rationally now: Mail the keys back and un-borrow the money, because prices are sinking fast while the debt isn’t. When the house was purchased not as a first home but as a rental investment, the decision is even easier. Imagine: Politicians keep saying that Americans need protection from their big, bad lenders — but that protection is already there. Of course, there’s a price. Mortgage “walkers” will take a hit to their personal credit rating. Yet this once-forbidding punishment may be discounted. That’s because, just as when markets change their behavior, people change, when people change their behavior, markets change also. If hundreds of thousands of people with decent work histories are going to have less-than-stellar credit because of foreclosures this year and next, they won’t suffer so much as in the past. Many walkers are going to want to buy houses again some day; and when they do, lenders are going to want to make money lending them money to do so (hopefully requiring a good down payment). Investors searching for yield likely won’t bypass what could be a large pool of borrowers.

Basically, the market is working. In Gelinas’s view — which I share — we don’t need a heavy-handed regulatory solution because homeowners will make the rational decision to suffer the consequences of walking away from a mortgage.

If I ever had the privilege of teaching high schoolers, one of the main lessons I’d want to teach is that life is about making smart trade-offs. At the start of the semester, I’d say, “It is entirely possible that spending time with your friends, goofing off, and not turning in your homework makes more sense than paying attention and turning in your assignments on time. Getting an F in a class never killed anyone, and some friendships will last a lifetime. But just know that you can’t have it both ways. You can’t both stay out all night and drink until you go blind and then expect to pass the quiz I give you the next day. So think: is it really worth it?”

The trouble with shoplifting is that the costs of the behavior are far more diffuse. The costs of mortgage walking are, in contrast, more concentrated, albeit not perfectly concentrated.