crime, poverty, and my now-silent commute
Following up on a discussion elsewhere, Eugene Volokh points to an interesting argument: crime causes, or at least perpetuates, poverty.I live in a neighborhood near MacArthur Park that could serve as a model for that argument, and have had the "crime perpetuates poverty" thought on at least one occasion. I walked outside one night to find that a thief had stolen the CDs I had in my car, and had also tried to remove my stereo by jimmying it out of the dashboard with a big screwdriver. That effort failed, but still ruined the stereo; it cost me the stereo, in other words, but gained him (or, less likely, her) nothing. As for the CDs, I love to picture a thief trying to sell my Neutral Milk Hotel and Sleater-Kinney albums on the street. I tend to doubt that this would have been a really lucrative theft. Again: a loss to me, but no gain to the thief.
Senseless, pointless destruction of property; risking arrest and jail for nothing; stealing items that have no particular street value. The causal relationships are muddled, here, but it seems to me that poverty self-perpetutates, to some degree; a degrading milieu leads people to waste energy on dumb and counterproductive behavior, causing social degradation.
Anyway, the dude forgot his screwdriver. I found it on the floor of my car. And I'm not giving it back, you bastard.
posted by Chris Bray @ 10:39 PM
2 Comments:
Get a new radio and protect capitalism from falling. And it would have the added benefit of making our ride to the Getty more enjoyable. Everybody wins! You save capitalism, the car-breaker-into-er got some practice, and I get to show you how to dance while sitting in a car driven by a maniac. The jist of it is: extend arms to anything that seems securely fastened to the body of the car, hold on with white knuckles, make a shrieking noise as if it were to be your last day on earth.
That shrieking noise that you make in my car? It's all the music I need.
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