> “A lot of people are like, ‘How, morally, can you do this job?’”
How did people's moral compasses get so corrupt that instead of believing stealing is immoral, they believe that stopping other people from stealing is immoral?
How did people's moral compasses get so corrupt that instead of believing stealing is immoral, they believe that stopping other people from stealing is immoral?
Walmart, to take one example, is one of the top employers of medicaid and food stamp recipients (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/19/walmart-and-mcdonalds-among-...), essentially forcing the government to make up the gap from the incredibly low wages that they pay their employees and enabling them, in turn, to make more profits. Is that stealing from the government / other taxpayers? If you felt that way, you probably wouldn't see much harm in stealing a couple of bucks worth of stuff back out of Walmart's deep, deep pockets.
Anyway, I think that's just one example of why people may feel differently about stealing from an individual versus stealing from a massive, faceless, profitable corporation.
> Although McLeod enjoys his job, he knows it’s one that’s frowned upon by many. “A lot of people see that a homeless person got arrested for stealing a candy bar. They’re hungry, right?” he says. “A lot of people are like, ‘How, morally, can you do this job?’”
I still think this is a perfectly moral (and important!) job. And it's the role of our justice system to define what punishments should be when folks are caught. But the context of the quote does change when you see he was talking about a situation where a homeless person takes a single candy bar. The "man steals a loaf of bread to feed his starving family" thing is a pretty classic ethical dilemma.
But that's also an insignificant fraction of shoplifting cases. Changing our overall policy based on it would be like legalizing running red lights because once in a while people are rushing someone to the hospital.
for everything else, it becomes this twisted worldview where shoplifters believe they're owed something by "the system." or because it's walmart/target instead of mom and pop's corner shop, it's like they're the modern day robin hood. the ability of our brains to think themselves into defending its own behavior, as immoral as it may be, is fascinating.
These are people who live in poverty. Their lives are so bad that punishment is near meaningless.
>busting people who are shoplifting items that they either need to survive or items that they can sell to survive to say, pay rent, because our capitalist system has shit on them and left them with no options
Property rights should not be above human life. Full stop.
I once took a greyhound bus across country. From Mississippi all the way to LA, the bus would stop at each prison, pick people up..they were all going to one place (LA), many of them for the first time. They had nowhere else to go, an open bus ticket, and knowledge that they could survive in LA.
These days, Portland and Seattle are increasingly popular places, not just sunny California.
it's just outright idiotic policy to accept the current state of homelessness in many major cities, it's inhumane AND expensive
That said, the system works. Some people get small personal servings for free; others pay extra for their full family's meal so the store can make up for the breakage. It's that same terraced pricing structure every SASS loves.
they need to survive by stealing is a failure of the system that is in place, either education or the social support system. Accommodating for the system's failures by giving up property rights is a defeatist take at best, virtue signaling at worst.
Sure, if someone's bleeding out on the street, and you grab a tourniquet from a nearby drugstore and run out without paying for it, you should get a pass. But I think cases like that make up approximately 0% of shoplifting. Most of the times people say that shoplifting is necessary to survive, it's not actually true.
Yes only things that can happen to kill someone within like 60 seconds are what should trump the property rights of the capital owners that have been looting the country and take advantage of the dire straights of the poor working class. Awesome
Problems should be solved with real solutions rather than sacrificing businesses who are not equipped to solve the problem. In other words, if “property rights should not be above human life” then cities should provide for those lives through taxes and meal programs rather than letting random businesses be targets.
I agree, but America as a nation isn't really big on social safety nets.
* Americans care about shoplifting but not social safety nets and it would mean that society has implicitly decided that some shoplifting folks may not get the support they need.
* Americans care about shoplifting and social safety nets enough to force political change.
I think what doesn't seem okay to me is to say, "Americans care about shoplifting but not social safety nets... but we are going to make an end run around what society thinks and allow shoplifting as a solution to the social safety net problem".
It is also much more organized now: rackets have a list of stuff to steal that they can then pawn off more easily. That is why LEGOs and laundry detergent are increasingly locked up.
A lot of them are in the position they are in now due to drugs and booze. Let's not conflate those homeless for economic reasons with the ones that just burned all their bridges via substance abuse.
> absolutely fucking horrible compared to what most experience in the US and other OECD nations
I used to live in Switzerland and the cops were pretty rough on the local drunks as well. They got a place to sleep at night, but were spared no quarter on everything else.
Quite simply this is false. Mental health issues generally lead to addiction, in nearly all cases its a dual diagnosis situation with mental health issues and substance abuse which is usually due to the mental health issues. These people are just trying to cope with their daily existence and all the rich people are constantly shitting on them, telling them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and hiring lobbyists and think-tanks to write legislation to shit on them more. We spend so much money on stupid programs instead of just giving people fking places to live its insane in the US
>They got a place to sleep at night
That's the big difference. Austria also has great public housing
However once they get there, they have little desire to not be there. How can you get someone off drugs if they aren't interested in getting off drugs? And not only that, decriminalization has made it very easy to get drugs and has made your city the go to place in the region if you want to do drugs? Even assuming all of the addicts deserve to be cured, how do you do that without cooperation? We can spend tons of money on them for sure, but it seems just be a pork and jobs program for a few organizations rather than doing anything that is effective.
Do you mean the problem will solve itself naturally if we let them do all the drugs they want? Yes, that's true, but it is a very morbid way of going about solving the problem.
We can still age restrict like we do with alcohol, we could even implement a licensing system where, similar to driving, education requirements must be met in order to purchase a given substance. There are many different things we can do, and nearly all of them are better than our current system
Not to mention I'm only discussing the effect on direct users, our foreign policy concerning substance legality in other could tries has absolutely wreaked havoc. Not only through our treaties with European countries but especially south america
In the US anyone can already drink as much alcohol as they want, smoke as many cigarettes. Both of those have immensely harmful health implications, generally worse than other drugs such as cannabis, MDMA, LSD, or even heroin. Heroin won't give you cancer, neither will LSD and no, the short term effects of those drugs do not make them worse, that's a load of shit spread by incorrect government propaganda
There is evidence from multiple countries now that supplying people who have a current addiction with clean, high quality drugs and gives them a safe environment to use reduces deaths, new addictions, and harm overall. Yet here we are, throwing people with problems in jail like that's somehow sensible. Its not, not even close. The way the US treats people with issues is absolutely disgusting
I've been dirt poor, I've been homeless, I've been alone in a foreign country with no one to turn to, I've lived in such shit places that my neighbour got shot down with an AK not 100 meters from my doorstep ... in Europe. I still didn't steal.
There are systemic issues which keep people down, that doesn't excuse immoral and illegal behaviour. I've known a lot of criminals, they're by and large scumbags, not some modern robinhoods stealing for the sake of their family because of capitalism.