Every liberal knows that poverty breeds crime, although data are unable to show such a correlation, much less causation. This understanding of what is called the root cause of crime was best expressed in one of those Woody Allen flashbacks in which his father is defending the family maid against his mother’s charges that she is a thief, “Of course she steals, she’s poor,” a truism and in this case a call to ignore the maid’s appropriation of the property of a family struggling to remain above the poverty line.
So when six men worked through two nights to drill into safe-deposit boxes in London, each putting in some 20 hours of hard labor, we can only conclude they were reacting to the lack of honest work at decent wages. And, even if such work were available, the minimum wage of about £7 per hour, or about $10, would have given each of them about $200, hardly a living wage with which to support a family in the coming week, unless more opportunities to appropriate other people’s property presented themselves. And grueling work it was — drilling, throwing up all that dust because the work place was unregulated by the UK equivalent of OSHA, working night shifts and on a holiday Sunday to haul away tens of millions of pounds worth of cash and jewelry. Even if the haul came to only £30 million, the low estimate, or $50 million, each worker would net hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour, far above both the statutory minimum and what the average guy on the shop floor makes. Now no sensible policy wonk would propose that the minimum wage be raised to that level. But surely something well in excess of the current minimum, or even the $10 per hour that Walmart, McDonald’s and other firms are offering to some of their workers, is warranted if we are to prevent other members of the poor from being tempted into lives of crime.
