Cause and Effect; R. Clites

THEFREEMAN IDEAS ON LIBERTY Cause and Effect: Crime and Poverty by Roger M. Clites I t is often asserted that poverty causes crime. I suggest that crime causes poverty. Obviously crime victims are made worse offwhen they are burglarized or mugged. But there are many other people who are made worse off indirectly by crime. A high crime rate will drive businesses out of a neighborhood. This eliminates both avail ability of products and services and a source of jobs. Further, those who do stay find it necessary to charge higher prices to offset losses due to thievery and higher costs of both security measures and insurance premi ums-if insurance is available at all. Property values are driven down by a smaller demand because of the greater diffi culty potential purchasers have in obtaining mortgage loans. The loss of productive activityby those who live by preying on others reduces the output Professor Clites teaches at Tusculum College in Tennessee.

of the area in which they live. Thus, crime injures economically both direct victims and others in the crime-ridden neighborhood. Just as all people are better off in a society where a large portion of people are more educated and more productive, all people in a crime-infested area become worse off than they otherwise would be. It is not just others who are adversely affected by criminals. Perpetrators themselves lose ground economically. A large portion of people charged with criminal activity are relatively young. Their criminal behavior harms them in several ways. They may spend time incarcerated when they could have been gaining employment experience. Their crim inal record may hamper them in obtaining future employment. They develop attitudes and habits that are detrimental to participa tion in the workplace. For these reasons many criminals condemn themselves to poverty. Crime is a major cause of poverty. D 151 THEFREEMAN IDEAS ON LIBERTY We Have Yet to Learn by Gregg MacDonald T he ideas of man, expressed in one way or another, have come down to us over and over again for the past 50 centuries. As we approach the twenty-first century, it is almost impossible to come up with an original thought. "What a great thing Adam had,"