Thread by @Doc_0

The Left's infamous softness on crime flows from the core Marxist dynamic of oppressors vs. oppressed. If profit is theft, then thieves who steal from capitalism's unfair winners are just "taking back" what is rightfully theirs. Criminals have no agency.

This is why real-world experiences with crime and policing are always baffling to Democrat politicians and left-wing academics. They cannot accept the notion that criminals respond rationally to incentives and opportunities - i.e. intensive policing and prosecution reduce crime.

Leftist media tends to vomit out headlines like "Crime Rates Decline Despite Increase in Jail Population" because they cannot accept that policing and prosecution takes career criminals off the street and intimidates would-be lawbreakers by increasing the cost of crime.

When leftists can no longer deny that punishment reduces crime, they pivot to denouncing the levels of enforcement necessary to reduce crime rates as unfair, oppressive, and racist. This is consistent with what Marxism taught them about noble thieves stealing from capitalism.

Under Marxist theory, there is no moral way to reduce crime in society without addressing the fundamental "crime" of privately-owned capital generating profits by stealing the surplus value of human labor. Until then, exploited workers will be forced into lives of crime.

This ideological framework is tremendously appealing to greedy collectivist politicians, because it provides limitless justification for more power. Rising crime rates merely prove that the Marxists need even more power and money to seek true justice for all!

You may suspect that many left-wing politicians, secure in their positions in one-party districts, succumb to the temptation to make crime worse deliberately, because they profit politically from destabilizing society. The Abolish the Police movement will breed more of this.

If you let Democrats steal all or part of your police budget to finance "social programs" (and vanish into the usual Dem slush funds), you can rest assured they will blame all increases in crime on insufficient funding for THEIR agenda, not the lack of police resources.

Of course that's very convenient for the greedy politicians and their tax-eating special interests, but it's also perfectly consistent with what Marxism taught them about crime and "true" justice. Controlling crime with enforcement and prosecution is IMMORAL to them.

If you're increasing the police budget and putting more cops on the street to combat crime, you're perpetuating the capitalist cycle of injustice. You're brutally and unfairly stamping out symptoms of social dysfunction instead of addressing "root causes," as only Marxism can do.

This, by the way, is the reason left-leaning writers tasked with imagining futuristic dystopias tend to come up with a future of both brutal law enforcement AND rampant crime. They're desperate to demonstrate that crime is an evil of capitalist society, not rational behavior.

Notice also that left-wingers recoil in fury from suggestions that only capitalism can generate the prosperity necessary to address the "root causes" they constantly complain about. They think joblessness causes crime and terrorism - but they view employers as exploiters.

How do you reconcile that seeming contradiction? Because Marxism teaches the Left that only GOVERNMENT jobs bring economic "justice" - either working directly for the State, or putting the State in charge of industries that create employment. The profit motive must be minimized.

The oppressor/exploiter dynamic explains so much of leftist dogma that seems contradictory or foolish to outsiders - and it's why Marxism survived its century of bloody failures to become arguably THE dominant ideological force in the Western world today.

It's so appealing to statists because under Marxism, every problem "proves" the State needs more money and power. If profit is theft and exploitation, if its pursuit is fundamentally immoral, then all righteousness MUST reside with the State, by definition. /end