Have you so little respect for people that you think they are all thieves? In India and China, countries in which most of the top 10% by income would fall below the US poverty line most people never steal. Theft is not mostly about poverty.
But that's the whole point. These thefts aren't people going hungry feeding hungry needy starving mouths. You have some people wanting to believe it's only people who have no other recourse to dying --they have to steal. No, most destitute poor people do not steal. They do without, go live with relatives, friends, beg, sell blood, dumpster dive, etc., but they're not gravitating toward UP boxcars. Those are run of the mill opportunist criminals.
Note how I did not state the people doing the stealing are poor. If you think they are, please explain the many images of people driving up in fairly new and rather shiny cars to fill them with looted goods.
This looting is not done by "the poor" and they are not stealing "to fill their hungry children's mouths". They are looting because it is free season, they'll either use or sell off whatever loot they get and spend the returns on whatever they fancy.
Yeah stealing food so that you can sell it on the black market lol.
Most poor people are not thieves, they are decent hardworking people and don't want to be associated with crime thank you very much. Stop glamourising theft
That is such a dumb lie, poor people steals from other poor most of the time. They steal since they want more, they don't care how much the other person has they just want easy targets.
What makes you think people are stealing what they need to live? That can sometimes be true, but is often not true at all. Either way there's no way in which theft, often from people or companies that have no hand in inequality, does not make things worse for everyone else. It screws over other poor people who don't steal because everyone else will be paying for the insurance and restocking of stolen property...
There are a lot of poor people who are not thieves.
I’ve always felt this framing condescends to them. Sure, there’s certainly more incentive to steal at the academic extremes (bread for your starving family), but people raiding trains for packages is something else.
There should be police response to this, and people doing it should get charged.
"Because they have never been poor, they had no idea what I might do. Why would I steal, when everyone clearly has enough?"
The assertion that "poor people are more likely to be dishonest" betrays a view of poor people that isn't very nice. Rich people are just as likely to steal if they think they can get away with it.
What is the point of the "nobody thought I would steal their stuff" comment then? It only makes sense if you assume poor people are thieves. In this case it was correct, but I don't think it's true in general.
Being poor is not an excuse for criminality. These people aren't stealing bread to live or clothing to not freeze. They are stealing valuables ("Louis Vuitton purses, designer clothes, toys, lawnmowers, power equipment, power tools") because they can, knowing their poor status will cause people like you to express sympathy for them and thus allowing them to get away with it.
They aren't stealing out of necessity - they are stealing because they can.
Oh, I fully agree that the poor more commonly commit and are victims of petty theft. What I disagree with is that hunger would even be in the top 10 drivers. Greed, addiction, antisocial disposition, lack of opportunity costs, are all far more significant. The idea that your typical thief is usually trying to put bread on the table is some sort of perverted noble savage fantasy.
The question is not whether someone steals or doesn't steal from the poor. The crucial questions are whether the divide between rich and poor increases or not and whether the actual buying power of the poor decreases or not. If the lower income classes have less and less, then something has gone wrong and needs to be fixed. That's currently the case in most Western industrialized nations.
One way to fix the problem, in one way or another, is by some form of resource distribution. If someone has got other recipes that could reasonably be expected to work, then they should put them on the table. So far, the "trickle down to the masses" methods favored by the ultra rich have not proven to be very successful and people cannot be bullshitted forever (or who knows, maybe they can, we'll see in the future).
Because they prioritize preventing the damage to society over their own personal gain. The point is that the decision to commit a crime boils down to putting the individual benefits over the harm being inflicted on others, which is why it is naive to say this kind of theft only happens because people’s needs aren’t met. Not only does this imply that all poor people are committing crimes (how could they not, when their needs aren’t met!), but it also implies that crimes aren’t committed among the non-impoverished population, both of which are clearly false.
reply