Some of the more progressive reformers on my radar throw out “wage theft” as the countervailing argument to shoplifting. Why, they argue, does petty theft garner national attention when wage theft, which involves far greater amounts of money, gets almost no attention?

The answer seems fairly obvious, as one is discrete and has visuals, and we are very much a visual society moved by images, and the other is some amorphous claim, sometimes mischaracterized as theft when there is a reasonable dispute about what wages are due.

Murky claims, complicated arguments and no cool images to capture the public imagination have taken a real and serious problem when it does, indeed, involve deliberate theft and relegated it to the perpetual back burner. There is also the nature of the perps, shoplifting tending to involve the marginalized and wage theft involving corporate greed.

But when Nikole Hannah-Jones of the 1619 debacle joined the fray, she found herself yet again hoisted on her own petard.

“A person stealing steak is not national news,” grouses New York Times historical fiction author Nikole Hannah-Jones.

She was upset that The Post’s coverage of the Hamburglar — a guy who brazenly walked out of a New York City Trader Joe’s with 10 shoplifted steaks — managed to go viral, even prompting Al Sharpton to say things were getting out of control.

“There have always been thefts from stores,” Hannah-Jones continues. “This is how you legitimize the carceral state.”

Some might reply that her grievance about the carceral state might not be the less hypocritical path she wants to take, given the adoration of the carceral state for those she feels less empathy toward, but I digress.

But what’s particularly galling about Hannah-Jones’ complaint is not necessarily her casual disregard of crime, but her hypocrisy. She claims this is a crisis of anecdote, that one sirloin purloiner does not a national issue make.

Yet liberal activists like Hannah-Jones have done the same thing for the past two years, with far worse results. They have taken local anecdotes and turned them into national policy. One terrible, deadly arrest in Minnesota led to riots where all cops were tarred as being racists. “Defund the police” was the call for everyone, everywhere, with no regard whether it was right for that community.

As this comes from the NY Post, it’s understandable that they might be making a somewhat unfair comparison. The anecdote of murder is more serious than the anecdote of steak stealing. That doesn’t make the latter any less wrong, but it’s a false equivalence.

But the point that we’ve become a nation consumed by extrapolating grandiose conclusions from anecdotes is valid. For years now, the media has sought to manipulate the emotions of readers by the rhetorical device of opening with a sad story, an anecdote, to appeal to the emotions of readers and create the impression that this one tale is universal.

What happened to George Floyd was horrific, but it was not the norm. Heather Mac Donald notes that in the year 2019, there were 7,484 black victims of homicide. Nine were listed as unarmed men killed by police. Setting aside that some of those could be justified depending on the circumstances, that’s 0.1% of the total. The vast majority of black homicides were committed by other black civilians.

The unduly passionate wildly inflate the number of unarmed black people killed by police, producing not only a grossly  erroneous understanding of the problem but dangerous reactions to cops in the misguided expectation that any engagement is likely to end in their death. If you’re likely to be killed anyway, you might as well try anything you can to survive. That’s a recipe for disaster, but what are a few more dead black guys resisting for the wrong reasons when there’s a cause to be won?

So live by the anecdote, die (sorry) by the anecdote? The irony of the NY Post editorial is that if any newspaper isn’t in a position to point fingers over the abuse of the anecdote, it’s the Post, which routinely conflates correlation with causation and anecdotal evidence with its preferred flavor of anti-crime hysteria.

Despite the clear statistical evidence in both policing and incarceration, however, the politics of the past two years has been driven by anecdote. Get rid of all bail. Don’t prosecute gang members. Downgrade all charges. Pack our legislative halls with politicians who call cops “pigs” and “bastards” or worse.

No wild exaggerations there, right?

The problem raised by NHJ is that these cries of the sky falling because of rampant crime is what raises fears and destroys any hope of reform to the system, whether serious or the simplistic sort preferred by activists. And so the window for change slams shut as the public puts fear for their safety above fear for the loss of constitutional rights. Stoking fear is a time tested method of manipulating public opinion, even more effective than making people cry over sad stories.

Which brings us back to why pushing wage theft as the “more significant” story than shoplifting will never work as well as activists want. While they’re not entirely wrong, and perhaps largely right about the seriousness and extent of wage theft happening across the country, it lacks any visceral hook to make people afraid or sad. If we were a society moored in reason, this might not matter much because we could distinguish the relative importance and risk of various offense happening around us and give each the thought it deserves. But we’ve become a society mired in emotions, and there just isn’t enough of an emotional stake to be found in cries of wage theft.

It seems the games we play to win the battle of the moment end up coming back to bite us in the butt when the other side plays them too, or when they no longer evoke the desired reaction. And yet, people continually seem surprised that this turns out to be the case.