Re: Capital punishment and death by any other artificial means.

From: Mark Grant (mark@unicorn.com)
Date: Sun Jun 22 1997 - 05:08:43 MDT


On Sat, 21 Jun 1997, Abraham Moses Genen wrote:

>[HTML stuff]

Please don't post HMTL to the list; it's annoying, wastes bandwidth and
very hard to read. It's particularly annoying when you also quote the
entire post you're replying to for no obvious reason.

To get back to what I think is your point from what I can decipher of the
HTML:

I was probably wrong about economics; Friedman argues for a system of
fines as Perry was discussing earlier, since execution only loses you
money whereas fines recover the costs.

There's a big difference between combat and capital punishment, at least
in an anarchist society. In combat you probably don't really want to be
there and you're shooting at someone else who'd much rather be at home
watching TV. In an anarcho-capitalist society if you voluntarily sign up
with a legal system which allows capital punishment and then commit a
capital crime, you have little to complain about when they kill you. Of
course if a crime is committed on such a person by someone from another
legal system the arbitrator might decide to allow a death penalty, but
that's only likely to happen in extreme cases. Unlike the current monopoly
law an anarchistic arbitrator requires a reputation for fairness and
honesty in order to operate.

While claiming that all killing is bad is very noble, at some stage you
have to accept that some people are so badly programmed that you have the
choice of either destroying their personality or destroying their body as
well (personally I don't see a great deal of difference between the two).
To give a topical example; what else can you do with someone like Pol Pot,
who's clearly demonstrated their desire and ability to kill millions of
people?

        Mark

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