Quote Originally Posted by OngBonga View Post
That doesn't mean to say that I think benefits are moral. They're not. They punish hard working people to reward the incapable and unwilling. It's just that if these people were left ot fend for themselves, the punsihment for hard working people would be worse than simple tax... it would be an unsafe environment.
A person commits a crime when he feels like he has greater marginal benefit from that than another activity and a lower opportunity cost compared to the next other thing he would do. This means that for a normal person to commit a crime, he has to believe that he is better off by doing so than he is by doing some form legitimate work instead. This means that if we want to impact that person, we can do so by changing the costs and benefits of legitimate activity such that he prefers that over crime.

Under current conditions, bad government policy impacts people towards crime and/or away from work. You have experienced this personally (as have I). You experience it with the government criminalizing marijuana. That is a field you would like to do legitimately, but the government does not allow you to. If you were a less scrupulous person, you might choose crime instead. In a way, the welfare benefits you receive from the government are effectively the government saying "we've made it so you dont want to work but here's some money to keep you from turning to crime." I think we should go to the source of the problem instead.

This issue is rampant in the states. A person wants to cut hair for a living but can't without shelling out $20k in "education" and for a license. This impacts the lowest skilled and least intelligent people away from that trade, and a fraction of them are impacted away from any trade, and a fraction of them turn to crime. Let's say you live in a poverty zone in the Deep South and you have a knack for making great bbq from home. You wanna sell it out of your house. Well, you can't, breaks the law. Okay so then the way for you to use your comparative advantage would be to work in a kitchen at a restaurant, but you want to do that a lot less than selling out of your house. But okay you would still do that. But wait you don't have a car. And your brother's a drug dealer. Maybe you opt to be a drug dealer too now.

Believe me when I tell you that the government is causing millions of people to either not work or not work in what they would most prefer to work in due to bad restrictions. Would everybody not resort to crime if the government did the right thing and stayed out of private transactions? No, but it would impact a tremendous amount of people away from crime.