Sex and the City's Cynthia Nixon Gets Ratioed for Saying Stores Should Just Let People Take What they Need

James Devaney. Getty Images.

I'm just guesstimating, but I'd say if you're reading this, you're not overly familiar with Cynthia Nixon. One, because I think if you drew a Venn Diagram of Barstool readers and "Sex and the City" viewers, the subset represented by the overlap of those two circles would be a pretty narrow sliver. And two, judging by the non-factor she was in New York governor's race a couple of year's ago, her following is, oh, let's just say, limited. 

But apparently she has ideas for what's ailing us. And an approach to economics, business and law enforcement that is interesting coming from someone who got famous play-acting a fictional character in a show about women who spend all day in designer shoes carrying handbags that cost more than my car:

Daily Mail - Cynthia Nixon has been slammed for suggesting CVS should let people steal from stores rather than locking up goods like laundry detergent. …

She was slammed by people who said the solution was not to invite theft. 

CVS, Walgreens and Duane Reade have been locking up items for years to deter thieves. 

Critics said Cynthia's tweet pointed to how irregularly she visited the stores, which have been locking things up since long before the pandemic began. …

Nixon lives in a $3.2million apartment with her wife Christine and their three children. …

Crime in New York City soared by 30 percent this week compared to the same week last year and robberies were 70 percent higher. 

As you'd imagine, Twitter was less than impressed:

Advertisement

Still, you have to hand it to her. Her approach to the problem of shoplifting is, to be kind, novel. I mean, if we're looking for new ideas, thinking just doesn't get any more out-of-the-box than that. Crime is on the rise. Stealing is a crime. Make it so stealing isn't a crime. Voila! Crime is reduced. Everybody wins! 

I mean, except for CVS. And the people standing in line to pay for their "clothing detergent," basic items and magazines filled with articles about the next big "Sex and the City" reunion. I imagine that letting other people just walk out the door with CVS' stuff would act as a disincentive to both being in business and doing business with that business. 

It seems to me that it's not so much about "criminalizing poverty" as much as it is "criminalizing crime." But what do I know? I've only been on HBO a couple of times. And I was just a community college B student when it came to economics. But I do remember  Adam Smith's point about how we don't get bread because of the kindness of the baker who doesn't want us to be hungry. We get bread because the baker wants to sell us the stuff we want so he can get money to buy the stuff he wants. Which sort of does work out for everyone in a way that her economic model of "Help Yourself to Our Goods" doesn't. 

Still, I'd like to see it tried. And I'm going to suggest that Cynthia Nixon go first. Frankly, I'm sure there's a ton of basic necessities lying around in a $3.2 million apartment that "so many families" could use. So the simple solution is to stop locking them up. Let people in so they can make ends meet, and for heaven's sake, stop prosecuting them. Or, she could simply buy out the store and hand out all the items she wants to the needy. But why do that when you can always try to Tweet a place out of business by suggesting it has no right to protect the things it's in business to sell? 

I can't believe someone with Cynthia Nixon's real world solutions and grasp on reality would have done so badly in the election. How did the Pro-Shoplifting candidate not get elected?