The law already does what Noah Rothman accuses the socialists of wanting. It imprisons the man who steals from his employer. It fines the employer who steals from the man. Writing in The Left Has No Use for Anthony Fauci Anymore at National Review, Rothman argues that the Democratic Socialists expose themselves as hypocrites when they seek to abolish prisons for conventional crime while demanding criminal penalties for wage theft, negligent landlords, and corporate polluters — evidence, he says, that they don’t want fewer prisons, just different ones. The hypocrisy he found is the one the law already practices. It simply practices it in the other direction.
The distinction is not the size of the theft. It is the size of the thief.
Pause here and name the thing he is actually defending. It is not law and order. It is the class gradient of impunity. The criminal code that binds the powerless in every detail — the precise felony threshold for shoplifting, the mandatory minimum for drug possession, the sentence enhancement for this or that prior — becomes vague, aspirational, and full of procedural grace notes the moment it touches a man who can afford a lawyer who knows the judge. The same system that sends men to Rikers without trial on charges a grand jury later declines to indict produces a deferred-prosecution agreement for a bank that laundered cartel money. The system enforces wage theft, pollution, and negligent property management against the poor with mechanical regularity and against the rich with the kind of gentle reluctance one shows a sleeping tiger. The mechanism is not complicated. It is who does it.
Now the catalogue. The roster is bipartisan and it runs long.
HSBC in 2012 admitted laundering money for Mexican drug cartels and for the sanctioned governments of Iran, Cuba, Sudan, Libya, and Burma. It forfeited $1.256 billion and paid $1.9 billion total in a deferred-prosecution agreement. No individual was prosecuted. Senator Grassley observed that the bank “has quite literally purchased a get-out-of-jail-free card.” The golden DPA.
Wells Fargo opened millions of unauthorized customer accounts between 2002 and 2016 under sales-quota pressure. The settlement: $3 billion via deferred prosecution, “with the bank itself, not with any individuals responsible for the fraud.” Former CEO John Stumpf was fined $17.5 million and banned from banking. A man who shoplifts baby formula gets a record. A bank that opens fraudulent accounts in your name gets a fine assessed against other people’s stock.
Boeing’s pilots deceived the Federal Aviation Administration about the MCAS system on the 737 MAX. Three hundred and forty-six people died in two crashes. Boeing’s deferred-prosecution agreement: over $2.5 billion. Boeing admitted that two of its pilots “deceived the FAA.” No executive was charged. Three hundred and forty-six people, and the company wrote a check.
Purdue Pharma pleaded guilty — twice, in 2007 and again in 2020. The Sackler family, who extracted billions while OxyContin killed hundreds of thousands, were never criminally charged. The 2025 bankruptcy settlement reached $7.4 billion, but roughly $850 million was set aside for individual victims, paid over fifteen years. The Sacklers kept the mansions.
The pattern is so consistent across administrations that it is not a matter of which party holds the White House. The HSBC deal was signed by a Clinton-appointed U.S. Attorney who then served as Obama’s Attorney General. The pattern held. It is a matter of which class is in the dock.
The question is not whether these are crimes. The question is whether we have the nerve to call them that.
And the smallest, hardest fact: the money recovered for wage-theft victims in 2012 alone — $933 million, according to the Economic Policy Institute — was nearly three times the $340 million reported stolen in every robbery that year, across 292,074 robberies. EPI’s separate study found minimum-wage violations alone exceed $15 billion annually — more than all robberies, burglaries, larcenies, and motor-vehicle thefts combined. Three times. The country’s entire take from every street crime, every house broken into, every car gone in the night — beaten by what bosses simply declined to pay.
Rothman does not argue that wage theft is not theft. He does not argue that negligent landlords do not harm their tenants. He does not argue that corporate polluters do not poison communities. He argues that the people who want to criminalize these things are hypocrites — because they also want to abolish prisons. If you object to prisons, you cannot criminalize the powerful. If you accept the current prison system as just, you are defending a system that jails the man who steals your television and fines the employer who steals your wages — and calls both justice. Either way, the employer keeps the wages.
A child who steals a candy bar gets a record that follows her into every job application for the rest of her life. A banker who steals a pension fund gets a settlement paid by the shareholders and a contract with the government saying he “neither admits nor denies” the facts. The same system that gives a teenager a record for the coat on his back gave the Sacklers — who extracted billions from a product that killed hundreds of thousands — not a day in prison.
I have watched this movie since Nixon. The plot has not changed: criminalize poverty, decriminalize extraction, and when anyone notices, call them a Maoist for noticing. The shoplifter gets three strikes. The bank gets the golden DPA. Rothman calls the people who want to correct this asymmetry extremists. To the defenders of the two-tier system, he is not wrong. Equal enforcement is the most extreme position there is.