It's silly to use fictional comic book characters to discuss real world issues, but universal basic income, billionaires can pay for everything, and "poverty causes crime" are very silly ideas, so perhaps it's appropriate.
The Left's economic beliefs are built around the Scrooge McDuck fallacy - the image of rich people with vaults of hidden treasure that could be looted by compassionate government to pay for a utopian wish list of social programs. They think most wealth is flab, not muscle.
In truth, fictional Bruce Wayne is not rich enough to finance lavish social programs for the city he lives in, and all of our real-world billionaires are not rich enough to finance the socialist wish list, let alone wealth-destroying absurdity like the Green New Deal.
The effort to loot wealthy people to pay for socialism would very quickly burn through the "flab" of their riches, their disposable income, and devour the "muscle" of their investment capital. Bruce Wayne funds a pittance of a UBI for Gotham for a few months and goes bankrupt.
There is no evidence for the left-wing shibboleths that poverty or inequality are the root causes of crime, either. There are examples, both within and outside America, with high poverty and low crime. There are no simplistic "fix THIS variable and crime disappears!" answers.
The Left idolizes another fictional character, Jean Valjean - the desperate man forced to steal bread, unreasonably persecuted for a trifling crime society forced him to commit - but that is NOT what most criminals are like, not in reality and certainly not in Gotham City.
The notion that a pittance of a Universal Basic Income - which both real and fictional worlds would go bankrupt attempting to provide - would make crime go away is absolutely hilarious. No, the criminals would steal other people's UBI money. That's what they DO.
People who push UBI claim it wouldn't depress employment because it's just a cushion against abject poverty and people would still eagerly work to fulfill their ambitions. To the extent that's true - and it's MUCH less true than UBI proponents believe - it's true of crooks too.
To return to the fictional example, the notion of Gotham City's mob bosses putting away their guns because Bruce Wayne pays for a UBI, the Joker shrugging and taking the acid out of his squirt flower, the Riddler taking up sudoku, is ridiculous on its face.
The truth about UBI, like other utopian schemes, is that it would subsidize two of the most destructive social forces that really DO cause elevated crime rates: illegitimacy and unemployment. Especially because the promise to end all other social programs for UBI is a fantasy.
There's nothing funnier than watching an earnest UBI proponent insist their government-provided basic income would permanently replace all of the other social welfare schemes. The proper response is to laugh at them until they start thinking straight.
Even in the absurdly unlikely event that a UBI scheme really did erase the entire bloated welfare state - and that ain't happening on THIS planet - the fight to bring every bit of the welfare state back would begin the day after the first UBI checks were cut.
You can't expect people to live decently on this tiny check! Why should THIS person get the same as THAT more desperate person? Why should privileged whites get the same payment as the minorities they've exploited since 1619? At least we need food stamps to supplement UBI!
The upshot is that UBI would either begin as, or swiftly become, just another welfare payout - and it absolutely WOULD destroy the incentive to work for marginal employees, and dilute the pressure to marry. You'd get more unemployment and more illegitimacy, thus MORE crime.
And socialists would eagerly stoke class resentments to harvest political power. UBI fans would be amazed at how quickly a sullen underclass angry about income inequality - and feeling entitled to steal from the unfairly advantaged to even things out - reappeared.
If you want to isolate one social force that truly drives criminals, it's not poverty, inequality, or even joblessness per se. It's ENTITLEMENT. It's the sense that you're entitled to take what isn't yours, to ignore the rules of an unjust society, to ignore the rights of others.
All these social welfare schemes stoke that sense of entitlement, and the Left long ago disabled all of the countervailing forces that keep criminality at bay: marriage, family, traditional values, religion, shame. Victim studies replaced them all. Of COURSE crime follows. /end
