It is theft though: they are taking something that would otherwise belong to someone else (the wealth difference that would have been accumulated), and they’re keeping it for themselves. That fits the definition of theft. The method may be more indirect, but the end result is the same. Inventing euphemistic terms to describe something that can be described with a simple existing word, will only end up muddying the waters in my experience.
Would the outcome have been the same without people in the media repeatedly bringing this to everyone’s attention? Probably not, because there would have been no public pressure against it, while the shadow groups that want this would have still been lobbying the politicians.
Something bad is going to happen.
Some people advocate to stop that bad thing.
Even more people are holding their clutches that the bad thing might happen.
Because of public pressure, action is undertaken to prevent the bad thing from happening.
Thanks to those efforts, the bad thing is successfully averted.
Some random person: that bad thing was never going to happen, look at all those gullible people who were panicking over nothing, we could have just done nothing and the outcome would have been the same.
Also known as the “preparedness paradox”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preparedness_paradox
It used to be that the first result to a lot of queries, was a link to the relevant Wikipedia article. But that first result has now been replaced by an ai summary of the relevant Wikipedia article. If people don’t need more info than that summary, they don’t click through. That Ai summary is a layer of abstraction that wouldn’t be able to exist without the source material that it’s now making less viable to exist. Kinda like a parasite.