The More Capitalism, the More Crime. The More Socialism, the Less Crime.

Steve writes:

How does capitalism cause crime? Maybe you could write a post about this. I’m interested in crime. Is it something to do with inequality, lack of opportunity and the emphasis on private gain and individualism? I don’t know if I can agree that Germany is a socialist country. Its got a government and a public sector and a welfare system but its got a large private sector. I don’t know what percentage of the workforce work in the private sector for capitalist employers but its a lot. I might look it up. The means of production aren’t socially owned, right? (Is America a socialist country by your definition?) It seems like you are crediting whatever elements of socialism it has with its low crime rate but it’s an affluent country, which surely has at least as much or more to do with its capitalism, and affluent places seem to have little crime. I’m also inclined to think that Japanese culture and probably its policing and justice system have a lot to do with its low crime. And we’ve got the issue of genetics that might be explored.

The link between capitalism and crime has been well known for a very long time. It’s not even slightly controversial on the Left or in the social sciences. If you want lots of capitalism, you’re probably going to end up with tons of crime. That’s just how it goes. The more socialism a country has, the less crime it has. Studies in Europe have proven this. In Europe, the more socialism a country had, the less crime it had. The less socialism, the more crime. It was pretty much of a linear relationship when you averaged it all together. Transitions to capitalism in Eastern Europe and the CIS were accompanied by orgies of crime. And as China moved to more capitalism, the crime rate soared, especially for property crime. There is now a fair amount of property crime in Cuba, especially in Havana. Whether this is related to increased capitalism is uncertain. Of course capitalism causes tons of property crime. That goes without saying. But it also causes a lot of violent crime. Even those of us who advocate using the market as a tool acknowledge that capitalism causes crime. You get a lot of good with capitalism – I would admit that. You also get a lot of bad, and one of the bad things is crime. If you think this website is valuable to you, please consider a contribution to support the continuation of the site.

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0 thoughts on “The More Capitalism, the More Crime. The More Socialism, the Less Crime.”

  1. ‘Studies in Europe have proven this. In Europe, the more socialism a country had, the less crime it had. The less socialism, the more crime. It was pretty much of a linear relationship when you averaged it all together.’
    Can you reference any of these studies or link to anywhere they are talked about?
    Maybe property crime increases with capitalism because people actually have stuff to steal and vandalise lol.
    The crime I am most interested in is violent crime and street crime, the kind of crime that makes people afraid to go out of their front door to the shops, that makes them less relaxed as they walk through the park. And maybe burglary because that makes people afraid in their own home.

    1. Maybe property crime increases with capitalism because people actually have stuff to steal and vandalise lol.
      Well that was sure a dumb thing to say. As if there is nothing to steal or vandalize in a socialist country, such as existed in Eastern Europe.
      About violent crime, I am not sure. I know that Havana is the safest big city in Latin America. The violent crime rate there is extremely low, and Cuba is 37% Black and mulatto.
      I can tell you that in Mozambique under Samora Machel’s Marxist regime, you could walk across Maputo in the middle of the night from one end of the city to the other and no one would bother you. Try that nowadays. There are all sorts of anecdotes like that.
      I see that you can’t grasp the obvious fact that capitalism causes crime and how it does it, and socialism reduces crime and how it does that. All you have to do is sit down and think about it, Steve. Think about it. Real hard.
      But I see that you capitalist fanatics just won’t give up on your myths.

      1. It’s not that there is “nothing” in socialist countries, it’s just that there’s very little. As if you have accurate crime statistics for any socialist country anyway. Otherwise, you have reached an amusing conclusion: “capitalism causes crime.” Here all along I thought crime was caused by people making a choice to engage in crime. But it was capitalism forcing them to rape, abuse children, torture animals, etc. I see the connection.

        1. Wrong! There is plenty to steal in socialist countries! And we do have very accurate crime statistics for socialist countries.
          It’s not an amusing conclusion at all. It’s an obvious fact that has been widely known for many years on the Left.
          Nobody is forced to commit any crimes. This much is true. However, the nature of capitalism does cause many folks to choose to commit crimes. It’s due to the nature of the system.

      2. ‘I see that you can’t grasp the obvious fact that capitalism causes crime and how it does it, and socialism reduces crime and how it does that.’
        I can certainly think of reasons why capitalism might increase crime and why socialism might decrease it. Now I have myself a hypothesis. Yay! But I want evidence! evidence! evidence!
        Sorry to rain on the parade.

      3. ‘Well that was sure a dumb thing to say. As if there is nothing to steal or vandalize in a socialist country, such as existed in Eastern Europe.’
        Its true that people didn’t have as much stuff to steal, right?
        Plus if the USSR had low crime rates, how do we know that it is due to communism and not due to people being shit scared of getting into trouble with the police?

        1. There’s always plenty of stuff to steal. The poorest countries in the world have sky high rates of theft. There’s a ton of theft in Haiti, in Africa, in the slums of Latin America. There’s never a lack of stuff to steal.
          It doesn’t make sense. In many areas of Latin America, street criminals are simply killed. Death squads roam through and routinely murder the local criminals. The crime rate is astronomical and the penalty is death. Prison is just as bad as it ever was in China, and there are 20,000 executions a year. But the crime rate still soared after Deng’s reforms.

        2. Were the cops any worse in the 1980’s under Gorbachev than they were since 1990. The Russian cops are the Russian cops. They were the same in the 1980’s as they are now. But the crime rate went nuts after 1990.

        3. Okay, Robert. You have made a good argument in these two posts.
          I still want to see stats though.
          Where can I find crime data for communist China and Russia and Cuba? Presumably you have already seen it.

  2. Robert,
    “You get a lot of good with capitalism – I would admit that. You also get a lot of bad, and one of the bad things is crime.”
    Indeed. Excessive capitalism has the potential to breed excessive yearning, competitiveness, envy, resentment and passion among people across class barriers. Combine that with a proclivity to obtain gratification via short cuts (which is all too common nowadays) and it is no surprise that crime pretty much rises with a rise in capitalism. Even the libertarians and gun owners agree to that. Why the hell would they even need more guns otherwise? It is obvious that they EXPECT crime to rise with increasing deregulation (which is the same as increasing capitalism).
    I see the results here in my town first hand which is the 21st century poster child for consumption. “Exclusive”, gated communities are popping up everywhere from intown to the suburbs. Laughably, even those are not immune to break-ins and vandalism. The apartment complex that I live in frequently drops in notes about apartments broken in and things stolen. It hasn’t happened in mine probably because its next to the leasing office. I talk about this to my friends living in cities such as Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Columbus and Chicago (all of them cities that I’ve been to) and their experience has been much better.
    Another factor to consider is that crime sells too. Every day, I turn on the news and there is a robbery or a shooting here. I don’t even watch the news on TV nowadays as it is either dominated by local crime or the elections. It sells though. Sells big. Ratings are up and the producers are taking more moolah home.

  3. Capitalism does not motivate crimes directly, but it fosters a materialist culture that is the perfect recipe for the social inequalities and discontentedness that fans a violent society.
     
    The majority of violent crimes in the world are economically motivated, followed by crimes motivated by sexual politics (which is indirectly, linked to economic). Free market capitalist society thives on fostering a sociopathic level of consumerism – by sending messages that there are those who enjoy a far better lifestyle in terms of money, power and sexual access than you do. This creates an obsession with money that is the reciepe for a criminal society – a society where an embittered bunch of have-nots take to crime to have what they believe they are denied.
     
    A society run by capitalist consumerism also dehumanises people, where people view others not as fellow human beings, but with an attitude of competitive adversarialism. It works in favour of corporations, who thrive on the vaccum created by a lack of human bonds to sell products which they claim would make them ‘happy’.

    1. I can see the logic but I want to see the evidence. If somebody could link me to reliable crime stats from a non-capitalist country, that would be swell.
      Or perhaps a correlation between level of inequality and crime rate would be interesting.

      1. Dude there are no stats. China was extremely violent far before it was ‘capatalist” and you couldn’t steal anything because these people had most of their possessions stripped of them in 5 Year plan after 5 year plan… Plus Russia and China and Italy and Germany and England and many larger Socialist and or/communist experiments withheld statistics of violence and crime to give an outward appearance of peace and harmony within their borders.. No one breaks into houses in Switzerland because every mother *&^%$# in that country has an assault rifle in their house and are trained to use it. I can go on for a while. There are extremely violent socialist nations all over the world but we don’t know about it because they keep information so tight lipped within their own borders.

  4. Ok, all these retards and their circular arguments gets us nowhere and it’s getting really annoying. Lets use logic and statistics from credible sources for once shall we? Denial is the first stage of truth.
    The number 1 ranking country with the most crimes is a Capitalist country, the United States. Surprise, surprise. Americans don’t give a shit about truth. I live here and there are so many bigots here I can’t stand them. Especially the white immigrants who call themselves Americans and then tells anyone who doesn’t like it to leave, but the IRONY is that they aren’t indigenous to America themselves.~American History 101. Capitalism has gotten them arrogant. Capitalism causes imbalance, if let’s say, there is an imaginary closed system somewhere and you have two people and a total of 100 dollars. If one person prospers within that closed system, then the other person They argue over stupid shit like gay marriage and animal rights, while Obama secretly signs laws to protect Monsanto from lawsuits. Now they’re trying to take away rights to own guns and the crime right is going to sour, because of all these restrictive laws. Land of the free my ass. Dumb ass sheeple.
    Here are the crime rates from the most to least listed below (Oh, what’s that? Someone actually went to the trouble of getting relevant information?). Personally, I don’t really give a shit what happens to Americans, because they are all slaves under a system that brainwashes them into thinking they’re free. As long as you’re working for money, you’re not free. Money itself defeats the purpose of freedom.
    Money is control. Money is debt. Money, in the form of currency is a government IOU, but guess what my brainless-faggotry-babboon-cunts? They’re never going to pay that debt off. And now, the 16 trillion dollar question: How did we get into this mess in the first place? Oh, that’s right, we borrow money. We live on the concept that we can get a free lunch without working, then work to pay it back little by little. Welcome to capitalism (ONE BIG ASS CLUSTER-FUCK). In God We Trust, right? Fuck your God, because he hasn’t done shit but have people kill each other in his name for centuries. That’s another thing you don’t want to get me started on, religion. You should listen to your black American rappers when they say “Mo Money, Mo Problems.” Because in capitalism, the crime rate is a reflection of currency inflation. In other words, to break-it-down for you American double-digit IQ faggot sheeple, that means, inversely, “mo money, mo problems.”
    And yes, the average American IQ is a double-digit and ranked 19 in the world. China, a communist/socialist country, the average IQ is a triple digit and they are ranked number 1 in the world.
    But I digress, look at the numbers and you do the math.
    # 1 United States: 11,877,218
    # 2 United Kingdom: 6,523,706
    # 3 Germany: 6,507,394
    # 4 France: 3,771,850
    # 5 Russia: 2,952,370
    # 6 Japan: 2,853,739
    # 7 South Africa: 2,683,849
    # 8 Canada: 2,516,918
    # 9 Italy: 2,231,550
    # 10 India: 1,764,630
    # 11 Korea, South: 1,543,220
    # 12 Mexico: 1,516,029
    # 13 Netherlands: 1,422,863
    # 14 Poland: 1,404,229
    # 15 Argentina: 1,340,529
    # 16 Sweden: 1,234,784
    # 17 Belgium: 973,548
    # 18 Spain: 923,271
    # 19 Chile: 593,997
    # 20 Thailand: 565,108
    # 21 Ukraine: 553,594
    # 22 Austria: 552,411
    # 23 Finland: 520,194
    # 24 Denmark: 491,026
    # 25 New Zealand: 427,230
    # 26 Hungary: 420,782
    # 27 Czech Republic: 372,341
    # 28 Zimbabwe: 351,153
    # 29 Norway: 330,071
    # 30 Romania: 312,204
    # 31 Switzerland: 307,631
    # 32 Turkey: 286,482
    # 33 Morocco: 283,702
    # 34 Venezuela: 236,165
    # 35 Portugal: 218,360
    # 36 Colombia: 214,192
    # 37 Malaysia: 167,173
    # 38 Peru: 161,621
    # 39 Bulgaria: 148,915
    # 40 Uruguay: 134,010
    # 41 Belarus: 132,867
    # 42 Tunisia: 130,375
    # 43 Slovakia: 107,373
    # 44 Greece: 102,783
    # 45 Croatia: 101,853
    # 46 Lithuania: 92,646
    # 47 Philippines: 85,776
    # 48 Saudi Arabia: 84,599
    # 49 Slovenia: 81,697
    # 50 Ireland: 81,274
    # 51 Hong Kong: 80,592
    # 52 Iceland: 60,242
    # 53 Zambia: 59,426
    # 54 Estonia: 57,799
    # 55 Latvia: 49,329
    # 56 El Salvador: 44,762
    # 57 Costa Rica: 40,263
    # 58 Jamaica: 39,188
    # 59 Kyrgyzstan: 38,620
    # 60 Moldova: 36,302
    # 61 Mauritius: 35,943
    # 62 Bolivia: 31,138
    # 63 Luxembourg: 26,046
    # 64 Yemen: 24,066
    # 65 Panama: 21,058
    # 66 Macedonia, The Former Yugoslav Republic of: 19,814
    # 67 Kuwait: 19,350
    # 68 Burma: 18,301
    # 69 Malta: 17,023
    # 70 Azerbaijan: 15,520
    # 71 Georgia: 15,029
    # 72 Papua New Guinea: 13,292
    # 73 Cyprus: 13,023
    # 74 Armenia: 12,048
    # 75 Oman: 11,782
    # 76 Nepal: 8,872
    # 77 Dominica: 7,857
    # 78 Maldives: 7,026
    # 79 Qatar: 5,838
    # 80 Albania: 5,303
    # 81 Seychelles: 4,297
    # 82 Montserrat: 751
    DEFINITION: Note: Crime statistics are often better indicators of prevalence of law enforcement and willingness to report crime, than actual prevalence.
    SOURCE: The Eighth United Nations Survey on Crime Trends and the Operations of Criminal Justice Systems (2002) (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Centre for International Crime Prevention) via NationMaster.

  5. You can no more blame capitalism for more crime than you can blame large windows for more flies. I’d rather choose the expanse of my own view than let some other guy. And virtually everything in life has a downside.

    1. Capitalism causes crime. Period. Mostly money crime, but also a lot of violent crime. Socialism reduces crime, both money crime and violent crime. Capitalism has a lot of good points, but in the elevated crime rate is definitely a drawback. Your last sentence is actually correct.

  6. Dear writer,
    Your article is an interesting one, in the relation of crime to different forms of government or social economic systems. However the comparisons are I think a little more pervasive than simple black and white. It would be noteworthy to add that it depends on your definition of crime. In many countries crimes are committed by governments or regimes that would seem abhorrent in the eyes of those in more capitalistic societies. In addition crimes can be more than those of physical violence against another. While I am not excusing the problems associated with freedom of choice, and free societies, it would be a crime not to point out that every dies, but not everyone really lives. I for one choose freedom, and while there is a chance I may fail, without freedom there would be no chance to succeed.

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