The Case for Burglary

One family's sorrow is another's joy.

If you're facing burglary, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson wants to help. "If someone is willing to make a call to reach out," says Paulson, "there's a chance we can save their property." But Paulson can't save this property because the property is not endangered in the first place. It stands to change hands, not to vanish.

None of this stolen property is going to disappear. After a burglary, one family loses out, and another gains. We see the sad faces of the people losing out, but we don't as often see the happy faces of the new property owners grinning proudly. Nevertheless, those happy faces are out there, and we should not discount them.

That's important, and it's important in a larger context. Often when it comes to economic policy, some effects—in this case, the genuinely moving stories of good people who can't afford HD TV are highly visible, while others—the genuinely moving stories of good people who can now achieve their HD TV ownership—are less well-publicized. That doesn't make them any less real.

I predict with great confidence that when I say that burglaries create new HD TV owners, a sizable chunk of my readers will scoff that "the people who can afford them would have been able to afford nice HD TVs anyway." I could use economics to explain why those readers are mistaken (a glut of HD TVs on the market leads to falling prices, etc.), but that's unnecessarily complicated. All it takes is the simple observation that there cannot be more HD TV owners than there are HD TVs, and if one HD TV gets stolen, then there can be one new HD TV owner. Call it the law of conservation of HD TVs.

That's one reason to temper your distress over strangers suffering burglary. Here's another: If you get to have a nice HD TV for a few weeks and then lose it to burglary, you are not worse off than someone who never got to have an HD TV in the first place. If the Treasury Department is looking for ways to help people, it would be nice to focus on the people who are most in need of help.

I predict with equal confidence that a sizable chunk of readers will attribute my observations to a failure of compassion. But which is more compassionate: to care about the fortunes of the people who happen to be in your field of vision or also to include those whom you cannot see? The HD TV less are out there. The starving children in Africa are out there. The would-be new HD TV owners are out there. Each of them, in different ways, stands to gain or to lose from the policy choices we make. To exclude them from consideration—just because they happen to be absent from the front page of this morning's newspaper—is not a compassionate enterprise.

The above was adapted with only minor changes from economist Steven Landsburg's column in Slate: The Case for Foreclosures: One family's sorrow is another's joy.

I'm looking forward to future columns on the case for blackmail and the case for rape. Somebody's pain is usually somebody else's gain. Can we get this bozo a "Stupidest Man Alive" nomination?