> I suspect the technical term for that is a "catastrophic lack of strategic thinking".
If I had used the word "should" instead of "could", I may agree with you (or at at least agree with you more).
> That approach is the fast path to poverty. It is more likely to lock in generations of families starving to death than any approach except total war.
There are heuristic predictions of reality ("is", "is more likely", when referencing the future or counterfactual reality), and then there is reality itself (which is unknown, but cloaked and thus not realizable as such). And then there is also a culture unnecessarily stuck in a state where they rarely make a distinction between the two - now that, to my mind, is a real catastrophic lack of strategic/etc thinking.
> The plan there is literally to identify the person in the best position to help and then start hindering/antagonising them.
You're "not wrong", but technically, it should be only a very small part of a well thought out (and thus much more complex) plan.
Not to mention: hindering and antagonism goes both ways.
> You've even managed to envision a scenario worse than just stealing stuff, which is already pretty bad as plans go.
Why is this worse than stealing stuff? Stealing stuff has relatively minor causal effects - it's become normal, "baked into the system", it has been skilfully accommodated as a "cost of doing business". Accommodating random, chaotic, and anomalous events that cannot easily be predicted in advance has much more potential for broad causal influence, at least as I see things (at least: it is plausible). As an example, consider how successful the immensely powerful US military does when fighting vastly under-powered "enemies".
Additionally: explaining on TV why people are stealing stuff is easy - explaining that someone's pool house got burned down and a "Your move." note was left at the scene of the crime is....not so easy. Or desirable, I suspect (the silly masses often have a tendency to get caught up in trends - best for everyone to keep their attention focused on Facebook, TikTok, the political outrage du jour, The Facts, etc).
> Can you come up with a worse path to prosperity if you try?
Easily. And I can also come up with hundreds of better variations - the advantage of this approach though is that it is simple (to understand, and execute), and it (as a singular discrete action) does not require coordination of large numbers of people (subsequent steps would though, of course).
All this is getting a bit beyond the level of colloquial reality we've become "accustomed" to though, so no need to take it very seriously - probably best to just file it under "far right conspiracy theorist" or something like that (choose your preferred meme) for peace of mind, as we do. It's not like the very system we live in deserves the same level of thorough analysis that we devote to the computer systems we work in at our days jobs.