The same can be said for drugs, homelessness, corruption, social media, and literally anything. Society as a whole is under attack by these things, and the costs it pays for them are much higher than ransomeare.
It's more of a cost to society. Once they lose all their money, what happens? They either turn to crime or rely on social services. In both cases society pays more than the would have otherwise.
Yeah, particularly when junkies get into things like copper theft, their cost to society can add up really fast. Things like destroying commercial AC unit to steal $100 of copper, causing tens of thousands of dollars of damages in one night alone.
Destruction of property value is huge as well. Think about how much your home (or apartment building) is worth today. Now think about how much it would be worth if the neighborhood or apartment building were occupied by large numbers of junkies. Nobody wants to live next to a meth lab.
A lot of those folks who are committing petty crimes aren’t downtrodden struggling to survive though. Many are junkies and a class of permanently homeless that refuse help/services and refuse to rejoin society. Why should law abiding citizens have to bear their costs?
A daily theft of $84 per day has much more than $84/day of cost in terms of corrosion of social trust. A government payout cannot fix that - heck it makes it worse.
It's also a very serious thing to use the resources of society to protect people's private accumulations.
If people get to use the force of law to keep their stuff from being stolen, they do have an obligation to pony up for the shared costs of that law enforcement.
Thing is they're all tied in together. If you have a class of folks in low socioeconomic standing, leading to criminality, that's costing real dollars - in terms of the legal system, in terms of prisons, in terms of lost income, in terms of healthcare, and jobs. The argument I'm making is they're all the same thing.
Especially when the people forfeiting your money are also the one criminalizing the drugs that the random criminal needs to rob your house to be able to afford, lacking any support for their conditions elsewhere because that money is put into police budgets instead.
(It's also worthwhile in discussions about "crime" to remember that it's a very loaded term. For example, wage theft numbers absolutely eclipse burglary, yet those are rarely what we think about when we hear "crime")
I think you might have it backwards. Petty theft doesn’t cause systems collapse - it’s the result of systems collapse. No matter how normalized, if there’s even a rare chance of consequences most people who can afford to pay will pay. That these crimes might be increasing (stats that prove that and aren’t junk are “hard to come by”) is evidence not of the theives not holding up their end of the social contract - but of employers, businesses, and governments not holding their end up.
Yeah definitely its a 1st-world problem. But in context, there's more money and value being squandered in Silicon Valley due to this crime, than if it occurred in many other areas.
Half these problems stem from massive income inequalities in society.
The president of the Netherlands famously bikes to work, vs the US president who travels around with a security detail at all times.
> His young children's best friends are their personal body guards - former military personnel that must be present around the clock as a stipulation of their kidknap/ransom insurance.
A problem stemming from income inequality. Organized crimes, such as kidnappings, start to occur in societies so unfair that being part of a crime syndicate seems like a good life choice for people.
If someone with 10 billion wants to feel safer, spend 9 billion improving the QoL in their chosen city. In an society of stark inequality, no amount of money can buy peace of mind, as you point out, money just buys physical security, and being protected from bad things happening is very different than not having to worry about bad things happening at all.
> Bob spends the majority of his birthdays alone, on the phone to my family member, often crying about how lonely he is.
I've had a few "wealthy", not rich, but 8 figure, friends and acquaintances. Perfectly normal house parties. The house is nicer, and the works of art on the wall are real, but nothing crazy. They also didn't flash their wealth around, very low key, nothing special until you opened the door and looked around carefully.
That said, I'm sure another couple 0's on the end of the bank account balance complicate things.
In a civilized society it is the governments burden and obligation to ensure scarce resources are shared responsibly. When this process is disrupted and not quickly remedied you will inevitably discover that people take matters into their hands to get what they need. They might commit white collar crimes or engage in destructive or violent robberies and protests. They might also roll out the guillotines and collect some scalps to remind society at large that the most dangerous people are those who’ve had everything robbed of them. When entire regions and communities are allowed to reach this point war is almost inevitable.
I’m not sure but it sounds like you’re arguing that the non-monetary cost to society of petty theft in general justifies prosecution of any amount stolen. This seems like a much more extreme view than I was even arguing against. I believe the threat to “social trust and cohesion” is at least directly proportional to the monetary amount stolen and therefore there is still a lower bound to what makes sense to go after. I don’t know how you’d calculate that bound though given the non-monetary cost is hard to quantify.
Many of them constantly suffer the consequences already but the street is not in it for protecting them. The street wants their cash into their own pocket.
I think you're just defining the size of a problem differently than parent. Parent (rightly or wrongly) assumes that things which are more violent are a bigger problem, whereas you seem to be purely looking at how many people this affects.
> Society may have a bigger problem with violent theft than with employers stealing wages, but that society views it this way in itself is a problem.
I'm with parent on this though, personally. I'd much rather more people lost some money than more people were physically hurt/killed. There are scope effects here - I wouldn't necessarily trade 1 armed robbery for 1,000 thefts or something. But I do think the OP is making a false equivalence which isn't really useful to the discussino.
Sure, negative societal costs are true of embezzlement, stock fraud, and wage theft as well. I wouldn't describe those crimes as violent either, unless by chance a separate act of violence was perpetrated in their commission. And, even though they are generally on an orders-of-magnitude higher cost scale than garden variety shoplifting, we don't normally describe embezzlers and other white collar criminals using dog whistle words like "thugs" either.
I find it so odd how society gets obsessed with boogeyman examples of people taking advantage of the system. There will always be some people who take advantage of the system. Accept that, keep it reasonable, but optimize the system for those who will improve it.
The flip side is this person is hurting society significantly less than some committing crimes - even worse crimes that are sentenced to jail time (which is very expensive).
I feel that it's an institutional problem in the U.S. Leaving cultural issues aside, if people were being taken care of, they would less likely have such an antagonistic relationship with society(which includes government, businesses, companies, other people, etc) where they could justify fare evasion and other "small" crimes. Ideally, people should understand they are ultimately stealing from themselves and hurting themselves when they do things like litter or steal. Because if they pay taxes in any shape or form, that's partially their money that's going to be used to fix it. Unfortunately, in the U.S., for many it feels like the taxes they pay either never go back to them in the form of services and infrastructure that benefits them or is out right used to exploit or hurt them.
Poor individuals also commit most of the crime that damages their community. Focusing only on the money at stake ignores whether or not the victims matter. I care a lot more about getting thugs and shoplifters out of my neighborhood than I care if Google 'violated' my privacy since the former hurt me in the real way and the ladder only hurts me if I'm white and paranoid.
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