"They Need To Eat"

Every so often, I notice a new trend on social media. Today's came to me via Quora, a question-and-answer website (follow me there, if you dare), and amplified a narrative I'd been picking up from the progressive corner of the political sandbox.

This trend is a novel spin on one of the great straw men of progressive politics - the "people are hungry" trope. More specifically, that capitalism is a failure because some don't get enough to eat, therefore we need big government and welfare states to offset. Excluding COVID spikes, government spends over a trillion dollars a year on the spectrum of welfare/public assistance programs, so if there are indeed people who routinely go without having enough to eat, the fault lies with the government, not with some "capitalism" bogeyman. The major famines of history are all political in origin - incompetence, ill intent, or a combination - and the same conclusion aptly fits any modern domestic hunger.

The new adjunct is a merging of the hunger trope with the embrace of lawlessness and petty-crime excusing that's become de mode amongst the Best-and-Brightest, and I've witnessed it too many times not to conclude it's a peddled narrative.

One version, that came via many questions, is along the lines of "what justification is there for shooting an intruder into your house, when he's just trying to feed his family?"

I don't need to deconstruct that one for you. The one that caught my eye was a response rather than a question. It posited that criminal penalties for theft, robbery, breaking-and-entering, and the like should be mitigated by the underlying purpose, as in "if they're doing it to feed their families, it should not be a crime."

Once again, the first rebuttal is trivially easy: "how do you know?" Especially in the moment of threat.

The "beyond that moment" is what's interesting today. The rejection of fundamental rights, of the self and of one's property, is at the heart of this justification for what up to now has been wholly-agreed upon as criminal behavior. It began with excusing turnstile jumping in subways. It grew to the non-prosecution of shoplifting to such a degree that many businesses are locking up staples, others are giving up and shutting their doors, and corporations have put forth a "don't even bother trying to stop them" policy directives. And, now, people are asserting that house burglars should be allowed to steal stuff, because it's just stuff, because the homeowners can clearly afford to let it go, and because the thieves are stealing for commendable purposes.

The human mind has a phenomenal capacity to resolve cognitive dissonances via creative rationalization, and this "they need to eat" bit is further proof of that. Our cultural tribalism has devolved to such a binary state that people are rationalizing overtly criminal behavior that they would be outraged were it perpetrated on them or theirs rather than criticize the nut bar policies that have emerged from "their team."

This is all part of a long-con degradation of the notion that you own the fruit of your labor, i.e. the stuff you buy with the money you earn, i.e. your property rights. Today’s “socialists” won’t admit to socialism/communism’s “the state owns everything” premise, and most who lean that way would recoil if it was stated that overtly, but the gag here is to wean people off such problematic themes as the rights of the individual.

I have to hand it to Soros and his minions. They figured out, fairly quickly, that their "let criminals run wild" philosophy was better implemented via District Attorneys' offices than legislatures. And, another bit of sarcastic applause to the narrative-peddlers out there who came up with the "need to eat" defense of robbery and theft.

I'm sure they all leave their doors unlocked at night.