Enterprising, or budding petty thief? You decide!

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When Alf Jones was a boy, he used to walk around the corridors of his school, and sometimes he would nip quickly into an empty classroom. He was looking for pens and pencils that some of the other more careless school-kids had dropped, and lost, in the last few days. Alf was a shy type, and pretty wimpish about it too. Large glasses, small frame, spindly bow-legs. He was the typical nerdish type, scholarly, but hopeless at any sports. Anyways, Alf collected a whole schoolbag full of pens, pencils, and the occasional ruler too. He would sell them back to the other kids at ten cents a pen or a pencil, and twenty cents for a ruler. He made quite a lot of pocket money from his doing of this. Alf would save up his money and buy for himself a phantom comic, his favourite comic character, and idol. Alf's father was a tough-minded brute of a man. He never believed in giving his sons any pocket-money. Let them earn it for themselves was his thinking. And yet, when he discovered his young son's hoard of comics stashed under Alf's bed in a cardboard box, he became very angry with young Alf then. "Where did you steal the money from to buy those comics?" he roared at young Alf. "You better come up with a good answer, or I will thrash the living daylights out of you, you little brat, you." Alf told him the truth, about how he had found these dropped pens, and pencils, at his school, and how he had sold them to the other kids for money. Alf's father looked at him queerly. He really wanted to thrash the kid, as he always got a sort of a morbid pleasure from his doing so. It made him who he was. A powerful despot figure to his kids indeed. But was this stealing, or was it just showing some enterprising spirit? For once, he let the kid off then with a warning. He said to Alf, "Well, if you really found those pens, and pencils, I guess, that's ok then. But if I find out from your teachers, that you have been stealing them from school-bags, and lockers too, I will double then this punishment, that you have so narrowly missed out on this time." What do you think? Was this really stealing that Alf was doing, or was he just showing an enterprisingly young spirit?