"If I make $100, and some stranger who I don't know loses $10,000...well, sucks to be that stranger, he should have paid a security guard to watch his wires" is the mindset of a whole load of people in the world.
Hell, I mean, there are people out there who will kill you for your $100 phone if they have the chance.
Strong disagree.
If the gains are high enough, lots of people who aren't poor will steal.
But if the gains are low, then there's a risk-to-reward ratio that comes into play and, generally speaking, the poorer you are, the high ratio you're willing to put up with.
Sure, there are those people too, but even then the risk-to-reward factor will come into play, it's just that those people are willing to take a higher risk not because of the monetary reward but because of the reward of the "thrill".
Parent's point is that poverty will lower the threshold for some of these categories. People who wouldn't care that much about money if they had enough to get by will get into stealing, not necessarily to get rich but just to get back to a state they're comfortable with.
You mean exactly like the employees, execs and shareholders of the big publicly traded companies many people here work for?
But it's evil when the homeless crackhead in your neighborhood smashes your car window for drug money, but not the Google/Microsoft exec who pushes ads with malware or addictive drugs on your kids for a career advancement and a nice house in California, that's just called innovation, where the former person is the looser and the latter the winner of our capitalist system.
Many profitable industries have been built on privatizing the profits and socializing the externalities on the environment, society, people, etc. Oil & gas, mining, motor vehicles, fast fashion, ads, gambling, food, pharma, etc. Usually on less developed countries, and it only makes the news when those externalities finally reach us here in the rich western countries.
More regulation, regular enforcement of law, and more responsibility in general for the people and firms that wield the most influence will prevent many otherwise great citizens from deciding not to play the game of civilized life. IRS getting massive returns from cracking down on wealthy tax cheats is one of many good steps in this direction under the current US administration.
That goes against easy money for corporations.
Fewer and fewer people have a stake in their communities and their community's prosperity. Fewer have a stake in the housing market. Fewer have a stake in our institutions working properly. Fewer have a stake in capitalism itself. It's not surprising that these things are slowly becoming devalued. The solution may involve welcoming back more people as stakeholders in society rather than pushing them away.
It's not like selling a stolen bike and pretending it's not stolen. There's just not a lot of good reasons for someone to bring into a recycler an old brass plaque from a city monument or a hundred yards of wire from a bridge. Law enforcement knows this at least and is lenient on the thieves if they help pin the fence.
And yet countries that aren't as rich as the US and are a lot softer on crime, have a lot less of it than the US. So maybe something is actually wrong in the US at a societal leve, that it has such a higher crimerate.
I think your conclusion is wrong because you assume "huge risk/effort -> people only do this out of poverty" when it's "almost no risk/effort -> people want a quick hundred bucks".
Deoderant in particular is incredibly profitable because it sells super well on ebay. Just search old spice deoderant on ebay and look at all of the obviously stolen merchandise.
It's funny though, because it kinda creates tons of jobs. the highly incompetent just steal and sell to fencers, the semi-incompetent buy stolen goods and fence them on ebay, and poor consumers get to buy slightly cheaper goods on ebay. the only people who lose are stores elling goods, and consumers who have to ask salespeople to open the locked up merchandise.