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The cost of enforcing zero bike theft is generally higher than allowing a few thefts.
I believe the phrase is "millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute".
I wouldn't go quite that far; there are probably circumstances under which we have to tolerate bike theft because the cost of preventing it is too great. But the tipping point is not "where the cost of preventing it exceeds the cost from losing the bikes".
And the reason for that, of course, is incentives. You pay off one bunch of Libyans, and sooner rather than later every two-bit bunch of pirates who can slap together a boat is going to demanding tribute, and the first bunch will be increasing their demands. It's not quite as simple as never paying the Dane, but you should definitely be biased against it.
And so "given an environment with bike thieves" is an error. The environment will contain more or fewer bike thieves depending on your efforts at enforcement.
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Given that time I had my purse robbed by some little bitch of a thief in a shopping centre, leaving me literally penniless with no way home, I am quite happy to spend more on enforcing zero X theft than just 'allowing' a few harmless 'victimless' thefts.
If Bike Cuck Guy is so happy about being robbed, let the happy thieves take everything he owns down to his last penny, then see how content he is about the level of happiness in the world being greater than the loss. Only someone who can comfortably afford to lose a certain amount of money or goods, which means little to no ill-effect on himself, would express such an attitude.
Maybe St. Francis of Assisi would rejoice in a thief taking the few pence he possessed as being in greater need than he, but those of us who can't afford to laugh off a loss of something that cost a couple of hundred quid (depending on the price of the bike) aren't so saintly and are more vengeful.
Fair enough, but even in the Wild West - where horse thieves were hanged when caught - petty theft was treated differently. During the California Gold Rush, petty thieves were flogged and released.
I don't think I've got the stomach to shoot someone over a bike; I might feel differently if that bike was what stood between me and homelessness...if it was as important to me as a horse was for a cowboy in the Old West. And law enforcement wouldn't throw me in prison for it.
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Are you engaging with what "zero X theft" actually means, though? That's not "vanishingly small number of X thefts," which could possibly be accomplished by scaling up the current enforcement mechanisms by a few factors or a few orders of magnitude. That's zero theft of X, which for purses or bikes would likely mean something like having full coverage surveillance of all public areas (and most private areas) at all times, and furthermore those policemen or security guards would also need full surveillance to prevent corruption, bribery, etc. Of course those people also need surveillance to prevent corruption as well and so on and so forth. On top of all the regular training needed. We'd probably need to commit a substantial majority of our population just to law enforcement. Even after all that, I'm not sure that zero X theft for something like purses or bikes is a likely outcome. It's really difficult to build a truly perfect system with literally zero failures in anything but the most trivial circumstances, and society-wide theft is very far from trivial.
If we call for anything short of that (and possibly even if we do call for all that I described above), that means we are fully admitting that we are completely okay with and accepting of some nonzero level of X theft in our society, even if each and every individual occurrence of such theft is an injustice that we seek to prevent.
I'm sufficiently pissed-off and vengeful that fuck yeah, I'd take that. We're not quite as advanced as the UK for the surveillance society, but full coverage would have helped catch the pickpocket instead of the security guard who stood around scratching his head and who did nothing to help me. Granted, by then she probably had passed it on to someone else, but at least even having better CCTV footage than existed would have let me make a complaint to the cops.
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We've had a recent example of what attempts at "zero X" look like with zero covid. Notably, it looks like that people who aim for zero crime and people who aim for zero covid are different sets of people.
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When we increase cop power to the extent that they can enforce 0 purse thefts, are you so certain that this power won't be used to enforce other things you might disagree with?
It's already being used to enforce shit I don't agree with, why not get some benefit out of it?
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Fair.
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