What did Marcus Aurelius mean when he said “Poverty is the mother of crime”? Surely he wasn’t trying to justify crime: that the vast majority of poor people keep on ‘the straight and narrow’ without turning to crime?
No, he was simply being realistic. When they see affluence round them, some of the people who’ve been consigned to the margins of society will consider they haven’t much to lose by breaking the law – and they’re right.
Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century shows the rate of return to wealth has been increasing at a greater rate than economic growth [r > g], so there seems to be pretty good reason for governments to reinforce their law enforcement if they’re to address projected increases in criminal activity?
But that would be to treat outcomes. Is there any way to address the cause?
Yes there is. There is unethical behaviour and white collar crime at the ‘top’ end of the wealth spectrum which interferes with the poor and middle class receiving their fair share of the national product. “Interferes”? That seems to connote a particular mechanism? Yes, it’s a very simple, but little understood, method of diverting the national wealth away from its producers to the drones or parasites who don’t produce it.
Australia once recognised that ‘economic rent’ was a surplus in the production process, and by taxing land values, built railways, roads, dams and bridges from the uplift in value that this capital expenditure provided to surrounding lands. This was ‘land value taxation’, and municipal rates, state land taxes and the federal land tax were based upon this principle.
But we began to listen to stooges for rentiers, crying that “a man’s home is his castle” and shouldn’t be the subject of taxation – and “what about the poor widow?” So, in deference to these emotive cries, we gradually reduced land-based revenues on publicly-created land values and increased taxes on wages and profits. But were the latter not earned incomes – the real ‘private property’?
Yes, we were sold a pup by the 0.1%. They’d convinced us to wind back revenues on society’s surplus–some 50% of the economy–and leave it largely to them. The fact that up to 70% of post-WWII Australians had become land owners, made the 0.1%’s case all the easier and we fell for the ‘pea and thimble’ trick. The uber-wealthy not only owned more real estate, but also the most valuable. Nevertheless, we 99.9% were prepared to trade paying our share of a publicly-created value for taxes on our incomes and purchases. And we’ve come to consider this as ‘normal’: the 0.1% won!
The 0.1%, including the big banks, real estate and media interests have become parasitical, living off the ill-gotten gains by privatising the public’s economic rent. It is they who create the crime of poverty.
In this light, it is incredible that Thomas Piketty could write a gargantuan book about capital in the 21st century without discovering the mechanism by which we’ve all been screwed!
We should be able see the likely outcomes if this scenario is to be allowed to continue: declining wages; increasing private debt; urban and environmental decay; further economic collapse; increasing poverty; greater crime.
We’ll get what an uneducated polity deserves.