It was pretty clearly flamebait—your own comments in response to it began with "Oh please" and "Christ, why?" respectively.

I get that the topic is relevant to you and you want to argue the point, but that's a different question.

Flamebait means a comment is likely to provoke a flamewar. This doesn't vary with sincerity, but rather with substantiveness and flammability. Those are the variables you need to modulate.

We have to moderate effects (or likely effects), not intent. Effects are observable while intent often isn't, and of course it's effects which actually make a difference on the site, whether intended or not.

Intent doesn't communicate itself, especially on flammable topics, so the burden is on the commenter to disambiguate it. One way to do this is to write thoughtfully and add information. Your reply here is already much better than your GP comment. This often happens in response to moderation—people respond by explaining some of the background that was in their mind but which they didn't say earlier. The thing to do is to include more of that in the first place, and then it will be clear that your intent is substantive discussion rather than provocation.

Here are some previous explanations in case they're helpful:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Don't lock them up. But charge penalties that greatly exceed the value of the wage theft.

If wage theft were a criminal offense, the people being locked up wouldn't necessarily be of the social class of people currently being locked up for non-violent offenses.

Preventing abuse of the impoverished may drive that down more than criminalizing wage theft locks up.

There's a massive gulf between crime with a victim like shoplifting and general petty theft and crime without a victim, like jaywalking, that everyone seems to go willingly blind to on an ideological as-needed basis.

Oh please. These crimes have real consequences, both financially and in quality of life for the people who live in these areas. Almost everyone I know has had their car broken into. I know multiple people who have been assaulted. I personally have had to run from a homeless man with a knife. I’ve seen people grind up pills on the roof of a trash can and snort them next to a police officer.

We deserve a better quality of life than this. There is absolutely no reason to tolerate people behaving in this way in society. These are adult human beings with agency who should face consequences for their actions. The problem isn’t lack of investment or infra, the problem is incentivizing behavior that is destructive to a functioning society.

Why not punish both? Shoplifting and wage theft involve theft. It's not okay to harm some random business because some other business made you bus tables after your shift ended or whatever.