Empact

There's abundant evidence against this belief:

  * Lottery winners do not commit less crime than those who do not win the lottery: https://www.nber.org/papers/w31962
  * Studies of identical twins adopted and raised apart shows that crime is more correlated with genetics than environment: 45% nature vs 18-27% nurture https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25936380/
  * "While individual study estimates vary, meta-analyses have suggested the level of heritability of antisocial behavior is approximately 40–60%. Shared environmental factors have been estimated to explain approximately 11–14% of the variance in antisocial/criminal behavior and non-shared environmental influences approximately 31–37%" https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6640871/
  * “Black men raised in the top 1 percent – by millionaires – were as likely to be incarcerated as white men raised in households earning about $36,000.” https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2018/03/19/race-class-debate/

Leftists ask “why don’t Americans hate capitalism,” while Americans live in one of the most prosperous and advanced societies in the world.

Affordability is a combination of individual productivity and the economy’s productivity. A substantial increase in the economy’s productivity through AI and robotics should result in greater overall production, which should tend to result in abundance, and thus a lower cost of living, which can even overwhelm a decline in your individual productivity.

This website is about what is banned in California, ostensibly for environmental reasons. So pigouvian taxes would enable them to unban those practices while mitigating their harms.

If you’re worried about people evading the tax, you can make a border adjustment for imports across national borders. Note California is simply forcing things to be done elsewhere.

You can also use pigouvian taxation to make polluting expensive. Cost savings is generally the motivation for allowing negative externalities like pollution, so a natural way to reverse it in many cases while allowing flexibility when there is no practical alternative.

I can attest that the Quaker Meeting on 9th street is an earnest reverent bunch. I attended regularly for some time around 2020.

This is an inaccurate description of what they are doing. For example Renee Good was actively blockading a street, by placing her car perpendicularly across it. Some may be engaged in observation, but that is not broadly the case, and organizationally, their apparent goal is to obstruct.

Is any law enforcement guaranteed to be exactly correct? No, because every person is fallible, and every system is made up of fallible people. This is why we separate arrest (police) from trial (judge) and judgment (jury), to mitigate those risks.

To malign a system because it is imperfect is to be unrealistic. Surely, we should minimize those harms, but they are not a reason to abdicate our laws.