Thanks to NIRP and ZIRP; Many Japanese Turn to Crime In Order to Live Off From Prison Welfare

The following serves as wonderful example of how government interventions fundamentally mangle society’s ethical fabric.

Through ZIRP and NIRP or the invisible redistribution/transfers via monetary channels, or the Japanese government’s thrust to inflate her debt away has only led to the crucifixion of Japanese savers.

Destruction of the yen has only shrunk the purchasing power or reduced real income of Japan’s dramatically aging society (yes Japan has a declining to population).

So the expanding paucity of income, such has now spurred many of the elderly to commit crime with the intent to get fed or live by Japan’s prison welfare state.

From CNBC.com (bold added)

Japan's prison system is being driven to budgetary crisis by demographics, a welfare shortfall and a new, pernicious breed of villain: the recidivist retiree. And the silver-haired crooks, say academics, are desperate to be behind bars.

Crime figures show that about 35 per cent of shoplifting offences are committed by people over 60. Within that age bracket, 40 per cent of repeat offenders have committed the same crime more than six times.

There is good reason, concludes a report, to suspect that the shoplifting crime wave in particular represents an attempt by those convicted to end up in prison — an institution that offers free food, accommodation and healthcare.

The mathematics of recidivism are gloomily compelling for the would-be convict. Even with a frugal diet and dirt-cheap accommodation, a single Japanese retiree with minimal savings has living costs more than 25 per cent higher than the meagre basic state pension of Y780,000 ($6,900) a year, according to a study on the economics of elderly crime by Michael Newman of Tokyo-based research house Custom Products Research.

Even the theft of a Y200 sandwich can earn a two-year prison sentence, say academics, at an Y8.4m cost to the state.

The geriatric crime wave is accelerating, and analysts note that the Japanese prison system — newly expanded and at about 70 per cent occupancy — is being prepared for decades of increases. Between 1991 and 2013, the latest year for which the Ministry of Justice publishes figures, the number of elderly inmates in jail for repeating the same offence six times has climbed 460 per cent.

The surging rates of crime among the elderly disguise a darker trend than mere contempt for the law, say economists and criminologists. Retiree crime is rising more quickly than the general demographic ascent into old age that will put 40 per cent of the Japanese population over 65 by the year 2060.

So as the prison system absorbs more people, the government’s budget will have to increase to accommodate this, thus furthering the vicious cycle of bigger debts and the destruction of the yen.

And more affirmation of how inflationism will lead to the destruction of society, from JMKeynes

Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose. 

Updated to add: Sorry for the small font.