Is shoplifting toothpaste okay or is it a crime? “Clearly, this idea that has emerged in a post-2020 world among socialists and millennials and other people who just want to get stuff for free is – ‘if it feels good, do it.’”
Government Accountability Institute vice president Eric Eggers was responding to a clip of New York City councilwoman Emily Gallagher, a self-declared “democratic socialist,” who advocates for ending prosecutions of small crimes like shoplifting.
Gallagher suggested this week that aggressive prosecution of theft of items like soap and toothpaste was misguided and said, “the true crime is that there is such incredible wealth disparity in this city that there are people who can be thrown in jail simply for having a biological need,” according to the New York Post.
Eggers notes that since voters in New York elected Zohran Mamdani as mayor, some residents have also stopped paying for bus rides, leading to reduced transportation revenue for the city. “I think it’s a $31 million shortfall,” he noted, that Gotham City taxpayers will have to find from somewhere else.
New York is just the latest city to tempt fate by declining to prosecute smaller crimes like shoplifting. In San Francisco, inner-city stores have closed or put their merchandise behind locked glass to stem open theft from drug and grocery stores, leading many big retailers to close stores.
Eggers, who has been a foster parent and worked with families through the child welfare system, told Newsmax the programs already exist to meet the needs of the poor, and suggests the real problem within those programs is the fraud that happens within them.
“We have lots of money that is dedicated towards meeting those biological needs,” Eggers said. “The difference is those programs often get ruined by leftist socialists because they divert money to places where it shouldn’t go, and then they want to expand it to ridiculous and insane policies.”
Eggers’s organization, GAI, has done investigative research on various types of large-scale fraud that happen in public welfare programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and more recently in Medicaid funding.
Turning Point USA’s Jack Posobiec, who also appeared on the Newsmax segment, pointed out that conventional wisdom often gets the connection between crime and poverty backwards. He argued that poverty does not create crime, but rather that crime creates poverty. When retail stores cannot operate because of losses from shoplifting, for example, they leave. This creates food “deserts” in cities and costs the community in lost job opportunities, among other damage. When government overlooks lawlessness, he said, it rewards more such damaging behavior.
“It is the crime that drives all of these things. And the behavioral ‘sink.’ When you don’t have basic law and order in these areas, that’s what drives the lack of investment, the lack of infrastructure and all of these things,” Posobiec said. “It’s the crime.”
