Copying my other comment here. There definitely is a moral issue
>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 live next to a grocery store with a high rate of shoplifting and I disagree. Grocery stores are not charity. The issue has gotten so bad that freezers containing frozen sea food and ice cream now have locks on them.
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.
In my opinion, America not being okay with social safety nets is not equivalent to shop lifting being okay. It seems to me either:
* 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".
A lot of it is just to buy booze and drugs in cities where the social services are decent (food is easy to get, shelter is available if are somewhat sober), but those two things are not provided, and many see it as a survival need.
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.
Yea let's just shit on the people who are at their lowest point in our society and not let them have comforts such as alcohol that the rich enjoy on a daily basis. The existence of people in poverty is absolutely fucking horrible compared to what most experience in the US and other OECD nations
> at their lowest point in our society and not let them have comforts such as alcohol that the rich enjoy on a daily basis.
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.
>A lot of them are in the position they are in now due to drugs and booze
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
There are many paths to addiction for sure. But a medical condition isn't the only path, or even the common one; just making a lot of bad choices can get you there also.
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.
Decriminalization and full legalization is what we need to combat the drug problem. Essentially all of the harm comes from prohibition not the drugs themselves, I'm saying this as a neuropharmacologist. That's one of the super shitty policies that we love in the US
> Decriminalization and full legalization is what we need to combat the drug problem.
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.
No, it removes the extra harm created by our bad policies such as a lack of regulation leading to a fentanyl tainted supply of heroin
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'll let the other commenters do the debunking of this extremely stupid point you made - just want to point out that this is so clearly some shitty troll account. 5 months old and all the comments are idiotic crap like this.
> Property rights should not be above human life. Full stop.
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.
That's an extraordinarily short sighted view of the needs of a living human
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
I dislike that kind of attitude towards the poor, it's infantilizing and strips people of their agency, it's like the modern "noble savage", just some others who are pure of heart and can only be corrupted by the evil influence of the system.
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.
What country are /you/ talking about? In my city, there are homeless people living in tents under every overpass, in every empty lot, parking lots, tennis courts, in broken down cars, etc. You think these people have trust funds?
No, but they have food in the cities they decide to camp in, which are selected due to weather, social services (e.g. calling Seattle as "Freattle"), and lax enforcement of camping rules.
You mean, homeless people choose to shelter in cities with bad weather, poor social services, and places where the police aggressively crack down on encampments?
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.
"surviving" in slums of filth and crime while likely costing taxpayers more than homing them would (not to mention the high prevalence of mental illness among the homeless)
it's just outright idiotic policy to accept the current state of homelessness in many major cities, it's inhumane AND expensive
I generally agree with the second part of your comment, but it is still true that homeless people survive fine, their quality of life is just usually bad. This is very different from starving to death and needing to shoplift
It's a little more indirect than you're presenting, but it is still a fraught situation where people have significantly shorter lifespans. Starvation is unusual, but murder, exposure, overdose, and withdrawal are common. A lot of these people shoplift to keep up a physical addiction that they can not easily or safely move on from.
How can letting people shoplift stop them from getting murdered? Also, I wonder how many people die of overdose who would have survived if they had less money to buy drugs with, versus how many people die of withdrawal who would have survived if they had more money to buy drugs with.
More people steal to "survive" that you probably realize. In my experience with lower income college graduates (arts degrees, for instance), the question of where to go to steal food for the day is a common discussion point. Could they survive by going to food banks instead? Probably. Or by taking any other job. But stealing is easier, less "degrading", and more inline with their career goals.
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.
On the other hand: this approach may act to disguise some of the distress that people are actually living under so that society thinks things are less bad than they are - and so less inclined to fix the problem in the "civilized" way: by welfare schemes that guarantees a minimum of dignity and daily needs
so
if I just do drugs and I take your property to survive, that's okay?
if I decide not to work, I can just go to any grocery stores to steal?
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.
Huh? In my city, shoplifters can walk out with 70 inch TVs while the police watch them do it (shop lifting is decriminalized). Everyone who isn't a shoplifter is pretty pissed off about it, I think the police are there to prevent mob justice from happening.
You're assuming a) that they're shoplifting items needed to survive, and b) that there were no other, legal, sources of the items they needed (food banks, ebt, welfare, etc.) that they could have chosen to make use of instead. Of course the fact that you chose to insert some political anti-capitalist quip nonsense shows that you're not really interested in arguing from good faith and instead mostly just want to further your propaganda.
>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.