Most of the truly dangerous lies are based on a scintilla of truth.

The "arrest poverty" narrative is based on a tiny bit of truth that grew into a massive lie.

Yeah, there are Aladins and Jean Valjeans in the world -- especially in poorer countries. It's an injustice to cut a person's hand off because he or she stole a loaf of bread out of desperation. That's why we have rules against cruel and unusual punishment.

It's perfectly fine to acknowledge that poverty can drive people to do things that they otherwise wouldn't do. What's not okay is the assumption that poverty is the catalyst for all or most crime. It's a bad idea to simply take the, "poverty causes crime" phrase and run with it.

Just last week, a woman in Oakland was stopped by a loss prevention employee at Home Depot for stealing a charger for a power tool. She pulled a gun, and shot the employee in the chest, killing him. If convicted, given the charges filed by the "woke" DA, she'll face five years in prison.

Tell me the evidence you have that this woman was stealing to feed her starving family. Was her two-year-old who was waiting in the car while the murder and theft was being committed hungry for a power-tool charger?

In fact, just in case you've been sleeping on the news unless it comes from MSNBC, this wasn't the first time that a Home Depot employee was murdered by a thief. When was Home Depot the place to go to steal bread?

Maybe the people who are stealing just under a thousand dollars in merchandise from Wal-Greens and Walmart are the actual Aladins, right? They sell bread, right?

What, you think that they're stealing $999.99 worth of bread?

You're starting to sound like Fat Tony during that Simpsons episode wherein Bart asks him if he's a crook...

Bart: Are you guys crooks?

Fat Tony: Is it a crime to steal a loaf of bread to feed your starving family?

Bart: No.

Fat Tony: Well, say your family don't like bread. Say they like, cigarettes. Is it a crime to steal cigarettes for your family?

Bart: I guess not.

Fat Tony: Now, say you have a very large family. Is it a crime to steal a truck load of cigarettes?

You get it, right?

The Aladins have a pattern of behavior. They avoid confrontation. They take a minimum amount of stuff, and they're practical. They also generally keep their kids as far away from the scene as possible.

Are the people who are stealing hundreds of dollars worth of steaks (which we have video evidence of), or thousands of dollars worth of shoes (which we have video evidence of), or thousands of dollars of yoga pants from a high-end fashion shop (again, video evidence) trying to feed their starving families; or, are they just people with bad moral values?

Just actually look at history.

Was the James Gang packed with a bunch of poor fathers, watching their children starve, and stealing out of desperation? No, they were blood-thirsty dick holes who were willing to kill for profit and the thrill of it. If anything, most of our glorified outlaws of the Old West (though most of the ones who actually existed operated in the East in real life), created more poverty, and more victims, and more fatherless children, and more orphans than they actually managed to feed -- its not hard to reach a number higher than zero.

If there has been a real victim of poverty in the last year or so, it was the eighty-something-year-old man who was still working at Home Depot, and was shoved, assaulted, and murdered by a much younger man who was walking out with a bunch of stolen goods. Way too many people, who perpetuate the "arrest poverty" narrative, would tell us that the murderer was also a victim, and that he never would have done it if we simply gave him enough money to survive comfortably.

This is false, and dangerously so.

What's truly perverse about this is that we all know that arresting poverty isn't the be-all, end-all solution to criminality. We're just lying about it because it makes the soft-on-crime angle more digestible.

The further left you go, the more you should know that Bernie Madoff wasn't stealing to feed his staving family. The further right you go, the more you should know that Stalin wasn't stealing grain from the Ukraine (in this case, adding the "the" is technically correct for the time period) to feed his starving family.

Some people are just evil. Some people just see an opportunity to profit at the expense of others, and take it. The more that we avoid punishing people for fucking over others under this fake idea that every thief is just doing it out of desperation, the more actual victims we'll create.

We need to stop this as soon as possible.