It’s Not ‘Just Property’ That’s Lost When Mobs Riot and Loot

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, July 15, 2021

 

 ‘There was nothing left to loot.”

 

That’s how one observer explained the eventual descent of quiet onto a Soweto commercial district that, like many others, was wiped clean by looters after the arrest of former president Jacob Zuma on corruption charges. An “orgy of arson and looting,” as Reuters called it, has left dozens dead and hundreds of businesses destroyed.

 

Neighbors interviewed by BBC reporters lamented the destruction. They may not love their local grocers and shopkeepers, but they rely on them for the necessities of life. The looters come and go, but, as one local put it, “we’re the ones who are going to go hungry.”

 

Some of the shopkeepers will reopen, but some won’t. Some of them say they expect more disorder and so will pull up stakes and go into business elsewhere or change businesses. One retailer says that even if he does reopen, fences will be selling “free stock” — the lovely local euphemism for stolen goods — which will keep him from realizing his usual sales indefinitely. He doesn’t expect to take all of his employees back and may not take any of them back. His lost business is their lost income.

 

We Americans are, for the most part, spoiled for choice. Very spoiled, in fact: Apparently, supply-chain disruptions have made it hard to get a green iced tea at Starbucks locations around the country, precipitating a few emotional breakdowns — and the company’s CEO is worried about the breakfast-sandwich situation, which is being closely monitored.

 

You’d think that recent disruptions in retail and hospitality — the global COVID-19 epidemic, the unusually intense winter storm that shut down Texas for a few days, etc. — would give us a newfound appreciation for the businessmen who do so much to make the lives of the middle classes and the affluent of the developed world so easeful. You don’t have to love them for it: As Adam Smith famously noted, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the barista, or the burrito artist that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest.”

 

(Okay, I revised that a little bit.)

 

Of course they are in it to make a profit — but we miss them when they’re not there.

 

It is a weird little tic of human psychology that we feel like we’re being had when the people we do business with turn a profit. If we were sensible — if we understood where our dinner comes from — then we’d be happy to see the grocer and the baker turn a profit and celebrate it when they turned a larger one. Personally, I cheer just a little bit for Jeff Bezos (PBUH) in his neck-and-neck race with Bernard Arnault for the title of world’s wealthiest man.

 

(Given Amazon’s newfound enthusiasm for book-banning, I slightly prefer M. Arnaut as a media magnate, even if billionaire dilettantes do not have the most reliable record in the journalism business.)

 

When last summer’s riots saw left-wing mobs (and, in the case of Seattle, a full-blown left-wing militia) burn, loot, and vandalize businesses in Democrat-run cities across the country, those who decried this destruction were lectured by all the best people that what was at stake was “only property” — something people only say about property that belongs to someone else. But for years before that, these same fine-minded progressive intellectuals had decried the lack of such property — the lack of deployed capital — in the nation’s poor neighborhoods, and particularly in its poor, nonwhite, urban neighborhoods. We heard about “food deserts,” about the lack of banks and similar service businesses, about the lack of retail competition that left many poor people facing limited choices and, in some cases, higher prices. It was supposed to be a scandal, an indictment of capitalism.

 

Perhaps it is an indictment of something else.

 

Target was obliged to shutter more than 100 stores during the 2020 riots, and this year it will close some of those stores permanently. Walgreens is closing stores in California because local authorities allow them to be looted on a daily basis. Other retailers are doing the same, both openly and quietly.

 

“It’s only property,” they say. But it isn’t just store stock. It is jobs, tax revenue, related economic activity, the businesses of vendors and drivers — and the needs of people, including poor people and elderly people who may not be able to go a few miles down the road to the next shop. It is the vitality of neighborhoods and communities.

 

The people of Soweto understand that more readily than do the people of Seattle, because they are on average a lot less affluent, with a median income of about $1,600 a month, as opposed to the median income of about $8,500 a month in Seattle.

 

But as rich as America is, we will end up in the same condition as any other country when there’s nothing left to loot.