I don't recognise property rights as an absolute. In fact, it is the uneven distribution of property that is the root cause of inequality.
Precisely. If you go to the poorest parts of the world you will often find very little crime. It's not just inequality, though. It is inequality combined with social pressure to 'succeed'. It is not a coincidence that crime rates in the country that propagates the myth of the self-made man, the US, are sky high. Inequality plus expectation produces the conditions for high levels of crime.
I'm sure you don't, which is why I'm a conservative and you're not.
Without absolute property rights the way is open for a powerful elite to seize our modest gains and impoverish us all. Attempts at egalitarianism lead to the opposite. The iron logic of unintended consequences. I don't claim to be an expert on Scandanavian countries, but so far as I know they're relatively settled, don't have the diversity Britain does, and are rather smaller. Point is, they're very different cultures, and comparisons should be made with care. I don't dislike them at all: I just think there's no point in trying to copy them.
Given that the middle class was by this time in rude health, that isn't really true. What we had in 1900 that we don't have now is a widely-enforced moral code. I'll grant that pressure to succeed can tempt people into crime, but only if conscience is weak. Trying to bribe criminals to be good is a band-aid that will fail: unchecked greed is insatiable. Address the cause, lack of restraint, not the symptom.
Which statistics are these? You've not posted any!
£100,000, no – assuming such wages weren't inflationary and they had the same purchasing power as now. But capitalism doesn't work like that. A person on minimum wage earns more than most people in the world. But they can struggle to make ends meet, because housing is in shortage and such things as a higher education now cost money. There is also the added stress of job uncertainty and the prospect of being hounded by the authorities just to draw a small sum of money to scrape by on.
What isn't true? That 70% of the adult population was disenfranchised? That really is true. Look it up.
This only works if we rate materialism above all other things. The worst aspects, like inadequate housing supply and unemployment insurance, can be improved within the current system, although I don't see why rent is "stolen".
Where did I say anything about the proportion of the population that was enfranchised?
Possibly, although I'm sure there are other factors that could be adduced in a brutal soul-destroying dictatorship.
Rent is stolen because it is not earned. Landlords make money not by working but by owning and exploiting others' need for what they own.
The same regime they've had for nearly 60 years, you mean? Things must have been so much more easy going during the Cultural Revolution.
Leeches don't put anything in. The shareholders have risked their capital, and get rewards proportionate to the risk. If the workers want to buy shares, they can.
I don't imagine there was much scope for knife crime during the Great Leap Forward! China's shifted economically in recent years. Maybe that's got something to do with it. Or maybe something else entirely. Whatever the trigger, the cause is a lack of self-control and conscience, as always with these things.
It's very vague to say "more like us". I don't see any evidence of a causal relationship. Crime statistics are feindishly complicated. You'd probably have to break it down by province, and be an expect on a host of cultures, to get close to an answer.
Providing essential services collectively is not telling people how to organise their lives. There is huge scope for personal freedom in such a model, just not scope for profiteering off the fact that you are wealthier than others – that's all such a system would do. In fact, there would be more freedom – freed from exploitation, the majority would no longer have to struggle.
You are confusing two things here. Self-control is going to vary by individual, but I can predict with almost absolute certainty that during a recession the number of burglaries will go up. This does not absolve the individual burglar of responsibility for their action, but the fact that I can predict it means that, after careful study, I should be able to say which kinds of society will have high crime and which low crime. Yes, we have to hold people responsible for their actions, but they are also a product of their environment. Given different choices, many burglars would never have turned to burglary.
Not so. So far as I'm aware there's nothing stopping people setting up lots and lots of workers' collectives. Freed from the need to make a profit, they could be a formidable force in the marketplace.
I don't think that's the reason. The middle class may have been in rude health, but so what. The disenfranchised poor of 1900 expected to stay poor, and they had no political voice (aside from a union) because they had no vote. So expectations were not ramped up. Aspirational adverts were not targetted at them. They were not told that they could succeed, that they should succeed. They were not told that material wealth would make them happy. They grew up and, in many cases, went and did what their fathers had done (in the case of boys).
Indeed. Maybe they'd have turned to fraud instead. Whatever its form the basic, selfish impulse -- thinking you've a right to hurt other people for your own convenience -- is identical. If crime goes up in a recession, it's only because the burglar can't fulfill the impulse in other ways. If he had the moral tools to resist temptation we'd be a lot safer. Instead of bribing him to be good, why not try to persuade him to reform?
I believe all househoulders had the vote by 1900 (or if not all, most of them). There were gaps, but that's plenty of people of modest means. And the swathes of Victorian advertising contradict your claim that material wealth wasn't promoted. They've been selling happiness for centuries. Whether it was targeted at your poor person or not, he or she still saw it and its message. Of course, the poor could always rise up the ladder and become enfranchised. And this is leaving aside whether enfranchisement could take unofficial forms, which I'm pretty sure it did.
Yes, I wasn't talking about starving mothers either. I'm talking about someone who wants to own more stuff, essentially, but doesn't have the money to do it. (I'm not talking about drug addicts stealing to fund their habits either – in reality, a large chunk of the prison population would not be there if we had sane drug laws.)
If you didn't own your house, you had to be paying above a certain amount of rent. As I said before, around 40% of the adult male population did not have the vote – that is, the poorest 40%. Advertising and the like were around, but in no way as ubiquitous as now, and it would have been pretty non-existent in working class tenements.
I genuinely don't think generous social provision has to go hand in hand with authoritarianism. The two are not causally linked. And it's not a case of 'state knows better', just one of 'state provides for basic needs'. With this bit, I'm only really proposing what we had before Thatcher – and expropriations would be done with compensation. I'd need to thrash out the details of that – nationalised industries were flogged off so much under their real worth, it could take a lot to buy them back, but the banking crisis has shown how much can be found where there is the will.
It's not an abstract like the world a thief is taking it out on, it's another human being. Maybe they've worked hard for what they have, maybe not. Maybe what the thief takes is of great value to them. Point is, the thief doesn't know, and attacks some else's security and peace of mind for his or her own purposes.
You're right about prohibition, and I used to employ a mechanistic "prohibition = crime" argument. I'm not so sure now. Why turn to chemical oblivion? There has to be an underlying cause. I suspect we'd have a serious drugs problem if everything was on sale over the counter, or heroin was freely available from GPs. Something deeper than the law of the market is going on here.
