[mindslight]

We can condemn each individual criminal for their personal choice to steal, but this does not have much bearing on the overall situation. There is no "government enabling them", rather there is a government that is necessarily choosing how to optimize its limited resources.

Meanwhile, a large store full of goods manned by a skeleton crew, which doesn't even hire a single person to chase down thieves, seems like quite the attractive nuisance. Why is it governments job to subsidize the security of this store's stuff through the threat of expensive post-facto enforcement against a bunch of judgement-proof perpetrators? Why do you keep absolving the well-capitalized corporation of responsibility and even agency ?

[antonkochubey]

>Why is it governments job

Because it’s literally the excuse for taxation?

[x0x0]

And I'm sure there will be some excuse for sf's clearance rates -- and that juiced by people not bothering to report crime here -- being horrific.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/police-sfpd-san-fr...

We're now at the point where Geico doesn't even ask you to cosplay working government by filing a police report. Because everyone knows that nothing will happen.

[mindslight]

It's one of the purposes, sure. But I don't think the set of people who want to raise taxes, and the set of people complaining about rampant shop lifting have very many people in common.

Would you personally support cities levying higher sales taxes on in-store purchases at large stores that forgo traditional security guards (let's imagine matching the state rate, so effectively a doubling) to pay for the resulting costs of those stores not preemptively securing their merchandise?