The FHA prevented landowners from using peaceful, private strategies to keep poor people off their block (which a 100% rational desire), so obviously they are going to use coercive government-based strategies instead.
Yup. Anyone who has Amazon Ring notifications turned on knows this very well. You can pretty much see all the implicit geographic boundaries within which people are posting videos of property crime with far greater frequency.
Queen Anne where I used to live in Seattle is a good example. Tons of ring cameras, yet very very few videos of property crime posted on the hill itself. As you move down the hill slope to areas with lower income housing, the number of property crime videos increases dramatically.
In my new neighborhood, Leschi, it is the same. You go down the hill towards Lake Washington where neighborhoods are nicer and safer and the quantity of property crime videos is very low. You head towards downtown and the quantity of property crime videos posted goes up.
It's 100% rational to not support policies that lead to an increase in nuisances like having your packages stolen or car broken into with greater frequency.
Not all rationale solutions are effective or ethical. Something being rationale does not make it appropriate.
Your solution is basically, hide the dirt under a rug. Yes, this is a rationale solution, and I do that sometimes when I have visit over, I just throw all the crap in my bedroom out of sight. But I have not cleaned the clutter, I have just moved it where my guests cannot see it.
So one must ask themselves, why are the crimes being commited in the first place? And how can we address that.
Because as someone well off, you can afford to escape trouble but only for so long. Once the clutter gets out of hand, there will be nowhere to hide it.
> why are the crimes being commited in the first place
Low intelligence, high aggression, high time preference. Mostly heritable. Sad but true. Wish it was different.
> how can we address that
Robust defense of private property (including protecting your community from incursion by criminals) or some way of reducing the number of criminals (most of which are politically untenable in the US, like eugenics, or no longer relevant, like extremely strict immigration restrictions).
> Your solution is basically, hide the dirt under a rug.
No, my solution is keep the dirt physically out of my house.
> So one must ask themselves, why are the crimes being commited in the first place?
Poor upbringing and values. It has nothing to do with being poor. Even poor people behave ethically and rich people commit crimes. The common denominator between poor people that commit crimes and rich people that commit crimes is poor upbringing and values.
I can better and more safely prevent myself from being the victim of a white collar crime by performing due diligence. After a crime has been committed, there's often a paper trail and it's easier to seek retribution through the justice system.
The only way to protect myself from street crime and property crime when it already has a foothold in my neighborhood is more policing and vigilantism. The former is difficult right now because a bunch of misguided people think the police are bad and want to defund them. They don't realize that the safety they take for granted is a sign that the police are doing their job. They've never lived in a country with bad policing. With the latter (vigilantism), I place myself and my family at risk. It's easier and far more effective to keep the violence and property crime dirt our of my house and just deal with the white collar dirt.
