Are benefits protection money?
I heard Kim Workman expressing a view this morning that withholding benefits from gangs would result in more crime.
He may well be right.
But is that what Mickey Savage’s grand and noble idea has come to? That benefits are now paid as protection money to some individuals or groups to ward off violence and lawbreaking?
Maybe a society could live with such an arrangement if it worked.
But it doesn’t. The crime gets committed anyway.
If we want to reduce crime, by Mr Workman’s logic, gang members should be paid more.
The tragic thing is that many current politicians actually believe and want that. If we just pay the unemployed and the unemployable more, Aotearoa will become some sort of nirvana. A shining beacon of social justice.
They are dangerous delusionists.