Crime, Punishment, Libertarianism, and Responsibility

By Dan Mitchell.

"Libertarianism is not just about freedom. It’s also about personal responsibility.

• For instance, you should have the freedom to consume drugs, but it’s not society’s responsibility to subsidize you if you become unemployable.
• You also should have the freedom to build a home in a flood plain, but it’s not society’s responsibility to rebuild your house if it gets water damage.

The moral of the story is that you bear the burden if you make bad choices.

But not completely. If I walk through a crime-ridden neighborhood in the middle of the night, I’m making a dumb choice.

But if I get mugged, it’s the criminal who should be punished, not me.

I’m pondering these issues because of a very strange column in the New York Times by Farhad Manjoo.

He writes that car companies are to blame for car thefts.

Millions of Kias and Hyundais are ridiculously easy to steal. For years now, most automakers have equipped most of the cars they sell in the United States with electronic immobilizers, devices that prevent cars from starting unless they detect a radio ID code associated with the car’s rightful key. But Hyundai and Kia…did not install this basic device in somewhere around nine million cars sold between 2011 and 2022. …The resulting crime wave has clobbered American cities. “We’re hitting close to 6,000 cars that have been stolen this year alone,” Adrian Diaz, Seattle’s police chief, told me. More than a third of the cars stolen in Seattle in August were Hyundais and Kias, he said. “That’s a massive cost…” Seattle is one of several cities that are suing Kia and Hyundai, and they make a compelling case. The carmakers should have known they were creating unsafe products. …Kia and Hyundai, not the public, should bear the cost of their irresponsible decision to sell cars without immobilizers.

Manjoo’s reasoning is wrong, both morally and logically.

Regarding morality, I assume he would not blame a rape victim because she wore a short skirt, so why blame car companies rather than criminals.

Regarding logic, he does not understand that Hyundai and Kia already are bearing heavy costs. They have suffered reputational damage, and the companies are also dealing with lawsuits from customers.

And lawsuits from customers are appropriate. Lawsuits from politicians (who presumably want to deflect blame for the consequences of their catch-and-release approach to crime) are a joke.

By the way, Manjoo understands it is blame shifting when people point to the role of social media companies, so he’s not even consistent in his analysis.

There’s a chance that Kia and Hyundai will escape some of the blame for these thefts because there’s a juicier target for politicians to go after: social media platforms, where the how-to videos have circulated. …Representative Joe Morelle, a New York Democrat, told reporters, “We don’t need companies like TikTok playing an active role in facilitating these crimes and putting information on how-to videos for people who would misuse them.” This strikes me as bizarre blame shifting.

P.S. This is the fifth time that I’ve written about one of Manjoo’s columns. Three times he’s been crazy wrong (here, here, and here) and only once has he been sensible (here). That’s not a good batting average."