A restaurant consistently providing bad food isn’t theft, it’s just a poor place to go. I have a great deal of sympathy for people living in areas captured by Russia or locked into North Korea etc, but in general it’s decades to generations of poor performance at this point.
> Define “net”.
All personal costs vs all personal benefits. Militaries and public roads etc may be basic functions of government but someone needs to pay for them and your personal contribution isn’t enough to completely cover such expenses.
Personally though, at some point theoretical vs practical takes precedence yeah. Or are we going to start going around ‘fixing’ everyone else’s political systems? Because historically, that hasn’t exactly helped has it?
If you look at the criticisms section of your linked page, you'll also see why social contract theory is more popular in high-school than it is with actual philosophers (most of whom think it's wrong).
An especially corrupt government might be a net surplus compared to anarchy, yet simultaneously a significant net loss compared to a more typical government.
Put another way, the government is failing to give its citizens what it owes them. By analogy, suppose your employer pays you half the wage they agreed to pay. That’s still a form of theft, even if you are still at a surplus compared to the alternative of being unemployed.