It is the short story "Black Sheep" by Italian writer Calvino

Black Sheep

Once upon a time there was a country where everyone was a thief.

In the evening, they went out with master keys and blackout lanterns and went to their neighbors' houses to steal. At dawn, when they returned home with their stolen goods, they always found that their own home had also been stolen.

They lived together happily like this. There are no unlucky people, because everyone steals from someone else's house, and someone else steals from someone else's house, and so on, until the last person steals from the first thief's house. Trade in this country is inevitably a two-way deception on the part of buyers and sellers. The government is also a criminal institution that steals from its subjects, who are only interested in deceiving the government. So life is stable, there are no rich and poor.

One day - no one knows how - an honest man came to settle in the country. At night, instead of going out to steal with a bag and a lantern, he stayed at home smoking and reading novels.

The thief came and saw that the light was on, so he did not go in.

This went on for a while. The people of the country felt obliged to make it clear to him that even if he wanted to live his life doing nothing, he had no reason to stand in the way of others. He stayed at home every night, which meant that one family had no food rations the next day.

The honest man feels he is powerless to resist such logic. From then on, like them, he went out at night and returned home the next morning. But he doesn't steal. He is honest. There's nothing you can do about it. He walked to the bridge in the distance and watched the river flowing under the bridge. Every time he came home, he would find that his house had been stolen.

In less than a week, the honest man found himself penniless; his house was bare and he had nothing to eat. But that didn't matter because it was his own fault. No, it was his behavior that made other people upset anyway. Because he lets others steal everything from his home but doesn't steal anything from other people's homes. So there are always people who come home at dawn and find that their home has been untouched--that an honest person should have gone in and robbed it.

Soon after, those families who had not been robbed realized that they were richer than others, and they no longer wanted to steal anymore. The bad thing is that people who go to honest people's houses to steal always find them empty, and they become poor.

At the same time, those who have become rich, like honest people, have developed the habit of going to the bridge at night. They also watch the river flowing under the bridge. In this way, the situation becomes even more confusing. Because that means more people are getting richer and more people are getting poorer.

Now, those rich people find that if they go to the bridge every day, they will soon become poor. They thought: "Let's hire those poor people to steal for us." They signed a contract and finalized the salary and how to share it. Of course, they are still thieves and still deceive each other. But the situation shows that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.

Some people are so wealthy that they don't need to steal themselves or hire someone to steal to stay wealthy. But once they stop stealing, they will become poor because the poor will steal from them. So they hired the poorest of the poor to help guard their wealth from the poor, which meant building police stations and prisons. Therefore, within a few years after the appearance of the honest man, people no longer talked about stealing or being stolen, but only the poor and the rich; but they were all still thieves.

The only honest person was the honest man, but he died soon after, starving to death.