30 Widely Accepted Falsehoods and Why They Are Wrong

1. Raising the minimum wage is an effective way of helping poor people.

            Actually, doing so causes increased unemployment amongst unskilled workers, chases away capital investment from the region, and tends to lead to higher prices for consumer goods, something which poor people are the most sensitive to. Giving poor people a direct cash subsidy would be much less disruptive.

2. Moderate inflation is much better than moderate deflation.

            Actually, moderate deflation caused by more goods being put on the market, so-called ‘growth deflation’, is an entirely benign, and actually a welcome, phenomenon. On the other hand, any inflation, moderate or otherwise, caused by monetary expansion always results in arbitrary, stealthy wealth transfers and economic distortions.

3. The familiar ‘business cycle’ phenomenon is an inherent offshoot of the capitalistic free-market.

            Actually, the business cycle is caused by monetary expansion via credit expansion, something which the government enables and encourages through its interventions in the monetary and banking system.

4. Government intervention is necessary to get an economy out of a depression or recession.

            Actually, even when we reach the ‘bust’ of the government-sponsored ‘boom-bust cycle’, the free-market is perfectly capable, if it is allowed to, of making the adjustments necessary to get out of a depression or recession. The ‘anti-depression’ government interventions usually just involve trying to spark yet another ‘boom-bust cycle’.

5. There is a certain class of economic goods called ‘public goods’ that only the government can provide effectively.

            Actually, the government has no rational way of determining whether ‘positive externalities’, the defining feature of so-called ‘public goods’, exist or what their magnitudes are. As such, it does not know whether its interventions in the provision of ‘public goods’, interventions which always involve the creation of ‘negative externalities’, will be beneficial or harmful on net. There are numerous voluntary, free-market ways of ‘internalizing’ the positive externalities involved with certain economic goods (such as bundling, contingent contracts, social pressure), thus enabling the effective provision of these so-called ‘public goods’ by free-market mechanisms.

6. Government regulations are necessary to solve the ‘tragedy of the commons’ problem.

            Actually, more often than not, the government, by refusing to recognize private property rights in these so-called ‘commons’, is responsible for creating the problem in the first place. Usually, a more complete and sophisticated structure of private property rights would allow the free-market to solve these kinds of problems in its usual manner.

7. Businessmen and capitalists are too concerned with the short-term, thus the government, which takes the ‘long view’, must intervene accordingly.

            Actually, private parties whose ownership of both the income and the capital value of a resource, parcel of land, or productive organization is recognized usually have an incentive to take a ‘longer view’ concerning their property than the government does. If they neglect the future too much, the capital value of their property will suffer accordingly. By contrast, democratic politicians do not own the capital value of the properties they are ‘regulating’. If they want to be re-elected, they are almost forced to narrow their horizons to the shorter-term in order to appeal to voters in the present.  

8. Government protects us from exploitation by private-sector monopolists.

            Actually, empirically, governments have created and encouraged monopolies far more than they have destroyed and discouraged them. It is very difficult for a free-market business to monopolize its entire industry, whereas it is quite easy for the government to create a monopoly. It just needs to pass a piece of legislation outlawing competition in that industry, something which governments around the world frequently do.

9. Government protects small businesses against big businesses.

            Actually, empirically, governments have tended to privilege big businesses at the expense of small businesses, not the other way around. The bigger a government becomes, the more resources businesses must devote to complying with complex regulations and to lobbying for special privileges or against specially harmful legislation. Due to their economies of scale, bigger businesses are generally better able to expend these resources in these areas than smaller businesses.

10. Governments socialize industries in order to help poor people get access to the fruits of those industries.

            Actually, if this were really the government’s main objective, they could just give poor people the money necessary to purchase the fruits of the industry on the free-market; there is absolutely no need to socialize the entire industry. In reality, industries are socialized in order to pursue egalitarian objectives and in order to give the government more control over the economy, even if this means the industry being made much more inefficient and much less consumer-friendly.

11. Without the efforts of the labour movement, working conditions and hours would be the same as they were in the 19^th century.

            Actually, increased productivity-raising average capital investment per worker leads to higher real wages, and many would opt to take these higher real wages in the form of better working conditions and shorter working hours, rather than purely in the form of higher weekly take-home pay. This phenomenon, even without the help of the labour movement, would be sufficient to ensure that working conditions and hours would not, in the modern day, be those of the 19^th century.

12. Government regulation is the only thing that can protect us from unsafe products.

            Actually, third party private safety certification agencies, combined with basic anti-fraud laws, would be sufficient to protect us from unsafe products, and would probably do so in a more effective and less heavy-handed way than the government.  

13. Selflessness is better than selfishness.

            Actually, everything that is pleasant in life can be pursued and attained effectively in a selfish manner (including the pleasure derived from helping other people). True selflessness is an absurd self-sacrificial attitude, suitable only for fanatics.

14. There is scientific consensus on the fact that human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, if maintained at their current levels, will cause catastrophic global warming within the next 100 years.

            Actually, there is only scientific consensus on the fact that the earth has been slowly warming for the past 30 years and that human-caused greenhouse gas emissions probably had something to do with it. There is still a lot of debate about whether natural causes may have been responsible for a lot of that warming and about the magnitude of the temperature-change that would result if humans continued emitting greenhouse gases at their current rate.

15. Gold or any other limited commodity could not possibly serve as the basis for an effective modern monetary system.

            Actually, this belief is tied to the belief that moderate inflation caused by monetary expansion is much better than the moderate ‘growth deflation’ we would probably get under a fixed commodity standard such as gold (see falsehood #2). This belief is fallacious, so a gold or any other fixed commodity standard would work just fine. In fact, with the increased importance that international trade is playing in our world, having a commodity-based, international monetary system is even more important to have now than it was before.

16. Fascism and communism are at opposite ends of the political spectrum.

            Actually, fascism and communism both involve authoritarian governments who strive to attain total control over the economy. Given these important similarities, they should be considered to be very close to one another on the political spectrum, whereas radical libertarianism would be at the opposite end.

17. There exists a universal standard of morality that every human being ought to adhere to.

            Actually, there is no good reason, besides broadly conceived self-interest, to do anything at all. Since following a universal standard of morality cannot, by definition, always be in every individual’s self-interest, there is no good reason why every human being ought always to adhere to one.

18. The interests of your ‘countrymen’ are necessarily more important than the interests of ‘foreigners’.

            Actually, you should feel free to put the interests of whoever you want before those of anyone else if doing so suits you, whether they are your ‘countrymen’ or not. No one has the godlike power to decree who you should or should not care more about.

19. Karl Marx was a great thinker.

            Actually, Karl Marx was a great botcher. His economic theories were fallacious and his theory of a necessary antagonism between workers and capitalists was thus fallacious as well. His prediction that ‘capitalism’ would impoverish the working classes more and more until the advent of socialism, proved to be spectacularly wrong. His ‘philosophy of history’ was overly simplistic and not very helpful, and his technological determinism ignored all of the complexities of humanity and human history. His theories led to rivers of blood being spilt in the name of absurd ideals and social systems. He truly turned out to be a plague on humanity’s collective house.

20. What we have now is free-market capitalism.

            Actually, what we have now is a mixture of interventionist crony capitalism, socialism, and some free-market capitalism. Many of the ‘evils’ that free-market capitalism currently gets the blame for can more correctly be attributed to government interventionism or socialism. 

21. Democracy is inseparable from personal freedom.

            Actually, some more authoritarian governments, such as Singapore’s, restrict their citizens’ economic freedom less than the governments of the western democracies do. Democracy and authoritarianism are political systems, while the amount the government restricts their citizens’ freedom is a policy decision that both of those political systems could potentially make the same way.

22. There are certain things, such as raw nature, that have intrinsic value.

            Actually, there is no such thing as intrinsic value. The value of something is always assigned by an individual, valuing mind. Without this mind, the concept of value does not make sense.

23. Taxation is not coercive.

            Actually, taxation is coercive by definition. People pay their taxes to the government with the knowledge that if they refuse, their assets could be confiscated or they could be thrown in jail by that government. If these credible threats did not exist, than the government would get its funding through voluntary contributions, not by taxation, and the government would be indistinguishable from a private charity, which is simply not true.

24. Voting in a democratic political election means that you consent to being governed by the resulting democratically-elected government.

            Actually, voting can best be seen as a form of self-defense. People know that they will be governed regardless, so given that unpleasant fact, it is better to try to pick the party that will prove, in government, to be the lesser of the two or three potential evils. Also, if voting is consent, than non-voting should mean non-consent. However, most people say that if you don’t vote, you are not even entitled to complain about any political outcome at all; the very opposite of non-consent!

25. Consuming your resources is better for the economy as a whole than saving and investment your resources.

            Actually, the very opposite is closer to the truth. Resources that are saved and invested contribute to raising the real wages of workers in the region where the resources are invested and to making the structure of production as a whole more productive in the eyes of people when they do eventually consume their resources. Consuming resources has no such general effect; it just benefits, in the short-run, the industries closest to the final consumer, at the expense of the industries more remote from the final consumer.   

26. If the economy grows, than governments can ‘grow their way’ out of deficits and debt.

            Actually, government debt is denominated in monetary, not real, terms, so even if the real economy did grow, if the money supply remained constant, it would be no easier for the government to balance its budget or pay off its debt. It would be more correct to say that the government could ‘inflate their way’ out of deficits and debt by causing (in the case of national governments) or waiting for (in the case of sub-national governments) more fiat money units to come into existence, with a more or less devastating impact on the purchasing power of its citizens, depending on how the real economy is doing.

27. John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie were good examples of ‘robber barons’.

            Actually, Rockefeller and Carnegie revolutionized the oil and steel industries respectively, and contributed greatly to making life significantly better for millions of present and future people who now had easier access to these products. They didn’t ‘rob’ anyone, nor did they even succeed in ‘monopolizing’ their industries, contrary to popular belief. They are examples of great benefactors of humanity; it is sheer unwarranted impudence to call them and those like them ‘robbers’.       

28. If the wealth and incomes of ultra-rich people were confiscated and distributed amongst poor and middle class people, the lot of these latter groups would improve considerably.

            Actually, if the saved and invested wealth of the ‘ultra-rich’ were distributed amongst the masses, most likely a significant fraction of it would be used for purposes of present consumption, and as a result the economy would soon become a lot less productive overall, thus soon impairing these same masses’ standard of living significantly. The fraction that remained invested after being transferred would probably be invested less skillfully in its new hands, also impairing the productivity of the economy. If only the income that the ‘ultra-rich’ used for luxurious consumption was confiscated, than when distributed amongst the masses, it would probably have an almost negligible effect on the masses’ average standard of living. But this action would significantly undermine the incentives of the ‘ultra-rich’ to invest and manage their businesses skillfully, which would have disastrous consequences.

29. Modern liberalism is a logical continuation of classical liberalism.

            Actually, classical liberals believed primarily in the free-market, limiting government, and laissez-faire. Their ideology was closest to that of modern libertarianism. Modern liberalism was created around the turn of the 20^th century when the Liberal political parties started putting more and more aspects of interventionist and socialist policy into their platforms. Presently, ‘liberalism’ stands more for government interference, whereas ‘conservatism’ leans a bit more towards laissez-faire (in the economic sphere at least), a complete reversal of the situation in the mid-19^th century when classical liberalism was at its peak.

30. Free-market economics relies on the unrealistic assumption that humans are motivated solely by material, especially monetary, objectives.

            Actually, sound free-market economics (ie. Austrian economics) relies on no such assumption. It is not a problem at all to include purely psychic motivations alongside material and monetary motivations in free-market economic theory; it is essential in fact, and the best economic thinkers (including Mises and Rothbard) have done so explicitly. Some unhelpful mathematical models of fanciful static economies constructed by neoclassical economists rely on the artificial assumption in question, but these models can be rejected entirely without doing any damage whatsoever to the main body of free-market economic theory.    

The Uselessness of Shame

Shame, or embarrassment, is the emotion that many people feel when others learn something about them that they wanted to keep hidden. This something could be a personal preference (ex. a man who enjoys watching ‘chic flicks’), a personal attribute (ex. what your backside looks like naked), or an action performed (ex. extra-marital sexual relations).

For whatever reason, you want to keep one of these kinds of things hidden from other people, or at least from most other people. It could be that your career prospects, your reputation, and/or the fruitfulness of your personal relationships depend on you keeping such a thing hidden. Fair enough; it is often wise to keep certain things hidden from other people. But shame is the emotion that pops up after the thing has been revealed. The consequences of the thing having been revealed will occur whether or not you feel internal shame after the fact.

This being the case, adding the painful emotion of shame on top of the negative external consequences of the thing being revealed is really just a form of useless self-flagellation. The more intelligent approach to take is to be discrete and diplomatic in order not to divulge potentially damaging information to the wrong people; but if for whatever reason the information is divulged, it is better to be internally shameless. Shame is a form of self-torture and self-torture is only for fanatics; the practical person is shameless on the inside, even if he must appear to be repentant for external purposes.   

One Easy Step Towards Self-Liberation

There is one easy step that you can take to liberate yourself from all kinds of constraints. It requires only a sheer act of will and thought: to forget about all the concepts, the mere words, that internally constrain you unnecessarily. Forget about God, morality, duty, conscience, loyalty, honour, virtue, nations, ethnic solidarity, and familial piety. Forget about the ideals that you have not chosen and those that you refuse to allow yourself to challenge. Forget about all these things and just ask yourself: how will this action really make me feel? How badly will betraying a friend really make me feel? How good will helping someone in need really make me feel? This is what’s important; everything else is just nonsense.

We are subject to all kinds of external constraints that we cannot get free from so easily. We are constrained by the fear of other people thinking badly of us, and consequently being less friendly with us and maybe even ostracizing us. We are constrained by the fear of being violently harassed by people, whether from the government or otherwise. These oppressive constraints we must, for the moment at least, put up with, and we must modify our actions accordingly. Why reinforce this oppression with internal constraints, constraints which we can liberate ourselves from so easily? Why reinforce the oppressive force of public opinion with internal moralism? Why reinforce the oppressive force of the State with internal legalism? Why subject ourselves to a whole new, and often bizarre, set of internal constraints by becoming religious?

The threatened cold shoulder of the people we want to cooperate with, the guns of the political State; surely these are constraint enough! But perhaps you say the world would be an uglier place without the concepts of honor, loyalty, duty, morality, etc… But if you think that way, then just create your own, individual versions of these concepts! Don’t just swallow the pre-packaged versions of these concepts, formulated by other people for purposes very different from your own. Create your own versions of these concepts if you like, and if you don’t find the concept useful anymore, than just discard it! Make these concepts your creation and your servant, not your master. If this were done, then finally these concepts would be suited to the individual’s own purposes. Only in this form would they be worth retaining.

How will the immediate result of this action make me feel? What will be the remoter consequences of the action and how will these likely make me feel when they arise? Are these not much more simple and useful questions to base your decision-making on than: What would God think? Would it be moral? Is it legal? Is it in the interests of my nation? Am I displaying virtue, honour, and loyalty? Is my duty done and my conscience appeased? You will have successfully taken a great step towards self-liberation when you can look at this latter set of questions and respond with: who cares?

Blame The Passive Victims

Who is to blame for the existence of harmful government policies? The most obvious answer is that the formulators, implementers, and supportive beneficiaries of these policies are the ones to blame. However, I would not blame these people for the simple reason that I could not, without trying to bamboozle them, honestly advise them to do anything different. If someone is a true beneficiary of a government policy, how can I credibly advise them to cease their support for that policy? If I were a true beneficiary of a government policy, I would support it too!

The group of people who can be more fruitfully blamed for the existence of a generally harmful government policy are the victims of the policy who take no steps to effectively oppose it, the passive victims of the policy. It is these people who, out of ignorance and/or inertia, fail to defend their interests against government policies which will result in their victimization. These people I have no problem enthusiastically and honestly advising to speak out against the government policies that are harmful to them. The voices and resistance of the victims is most likely the only thing that can result in a change in these kinds of policies. It would be foolish to expect the beneficiaries of the policy to self-sacrificially do this work instead.

Let us consider some examples. I favour the liberalization of the medical profession and the removal of the monopoly status of the Medical Associations. In pursuit of this aim, am I going to try to convince established doctors and Medical Association brass to support my cause? No, that would be a fool’s errand. Rather, I will bring my case to the medical consumer who is frustrated with the high prices and scarcity of doctors. If the policy remains unchanged, I will not blame the established doctors and Medical Association brass for opposing it, they are only doing what is natural. Rather, I will blame the passive medical consumer who refuses to recognize that this policy is victimizing them and who refuses to effectively stand up for their interests.

I favour full free-trade between nations. Will I try to convince tariff-protected, relatively inefficient domestic producers to join my cause? Banish the thought! Rather, I will try to get support from general consumers and from competitive businesses who don’t need tariff-protection and who would benefit from cheaper imports. If tariffs remain, I would assign the blame to the latter groups, not the former.

This perspective makes it easier to see the futility of the ‘good politician’ strategy. Many people argue that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with our political process, we just need to get the right people into political office and then all will be well. These ‘good politicians’ will allegedly selflessly pursue the ‘general interest’ and will have the intelligence and knowledge necessary to do so effectively. They will know when the government should intervene, and when they should let the free-market run its course unhampered. With such people in power, proponents of this strategy maintain, libertarian complaints about the evils of State power will no longer apply.

The problem is that the likelihood of this kind of person taking and maintaining power is almost vanishingly small. This is because being a ‘good politician’ is generally not in the interests of an individual politician. To become a ‘good politician’, an individual would have to be both foolish enough to self-sacrificially pursue the ‘general interest’ at the expense of their own interest, and smart enough to know what policies would effectively advance this ‘general interest’.

If such a rare mixture of fool and sage managed to get into power, what would be the result? They would perhaps manage to ram a few good reforms through the political process, but then what? Their elite (rich and influential) supporters would soon abandon them, most special interest groups would shun them, the media and the press would turn on them. In the next election, their political party would be obliterated and their political career would be ruined. The succeeding government would either immediately repeal or start gradually eroding the reforms that were passed. Is it really plausible to maintain that a person who had the cunning and savvy to claw their way to the top of the political ladder would, as soon as they took power, turn around and rapidly precipitate their own downfall like this for the sake of a few ephemeral policy victories?  It seems foolish to put our faith in such a rare bird.

Most politicians will just go with the political flow and will be rewarded for it. There is no reason to believe that they will go out of their way to pursue knowledge that would point to the general harmfulness of the general ‘political consensus’. Why pursue knowledge of real free-market economics and libertarian political theory if there is no realistic way of putting these ideas into practice? Doing so would just be a kind of intellectual self-flagellation.

I do not blame this kind of politician for acting the way that they do; it is only natural after all. It is the victims who suffer from the delusion that most politicians have their best interests at heart that I blame. If these people do not wake up to the realities of political life, then the sociopolitical elites will just carry on privileging themselves at the expense of political outsiders. Only a change in the mindset of these political victims will be able to change the political world.

Reforming The Criminal Justice System: Thinking Outside The Prison Cell

Introduction

There are five main objectives that can be advanced by applying criminal sanctions: restitution, rehabilitation, retribution, isolation, and deterrence. I will discuss these five in turn, examining how effectively the most common criminal sanction currently, jail time, fares in advancing each one of these five objectives, and suggesting alternatives that might advance these individual objectives more effectively. Then, I will attempt to pull the threads together in order to sketch a picture of what a more effective, reformed criminal justice system might look like.

1. Restitution

The idea behind restitution is to try to put the victim of a crime, as much as a money payment can do so, in a similar position to what they would have been in had the crime not been committed. Being responsible for causing the damage, the criminal bears the responsibility for making this money payment.

The current criminal justice system doesn’t even try to get the criminal to provide restitution to the victim. In fact, in a sense it does the opposite. Not only is the victim not recompensed for the damage that they suffer, they must also, as taxpayers, fund the incarceration of the criminal in a jail.

If the victim wants any kind of monetary restitution at all, they must try to sue the criminal, in a completely separate trial, in a civil court for tort damages. But the criminal justice system as such does not really help the victims of crimes at all.

One can think of ways to make restitution a more central part of the criminal justice system. The methods for doing so can be divided into two types: free-range restitution and confined restitution.

One kind of free-range restitution is asset seizure. If the criminal has cash or other assets, just seize enough of them upon conviction to provide proper restitution to the victim, no civil suit necessary. Another kind is court-ordered installment payments. If the criminal does not have any valuable assets, the court can order that they make regular installment payments of the restitution money, with the interval set with the criminal’s potential earning power in mind. If they fail to make the payments, then another criminal sanction could be applied.

We would turn to confined restitution when we don’t think it advisable to let the criminal retain their full freedom of movement. A way would have to be found to both confine the criminal and allow them to engage in the productive economic activity necessary to pay the restitution at the same time, something I will discuss below.

2. Rehabilitation

The idea behind rehabilitation is that people commit crimes because they have some kind of mental ‘sickness’, one that can be cured through a process of rehabilitation.

Locking someone in a jail is a terrible method of rehabilitation, in fact it is likely to lead to the opposite. Criminals are removed from normal society and placed in a prison society filled with other criminally-inclined people. Here, they cannot really do any productive work, must fight to survive, and are routinely degraded and humiliated by both guards and other prisoners. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that precious little ‘rehabilitation’ is going to happen in such a setting, and that the more likely outcome is that the experience will make the person even more criminally-inclined than they were before.  

The only way I can think of to make someone less criminally-inclined is to somehow get them used to living and thriving in a non-criminal manner. Pushing them to perform the economic activities convicted criminals would need to engage in to pay back restitution to their victim could be a method for doing this.

3. Retribution

A sense of social reciprocity seems to be hardwired into most people’s brains. If someone does something nice for you, most people will wish that person well in return. But if someone does something nasty to you, then a lot of people will wish something nasty on that person in return. The process of making sure that something nasty happens to such people is called revenge, or retribution.

The Lex Talionis, or ‘eye for an eye’ style justice, is probably the most satisfying method of handing out criminal sanctions from the standpoint of retribution. If someone shoots you in the leg, you get to shoot him in the leg. If someone kills your mother, you get to kill him. This kind of justice is satisfying to a lot of people because of that strong sense of social reciprocity which they have.

Locking someone in prison for doing something bad is much less satisfying from a retribution standpoint. If someone kills your mother, he gets locked in a prison, funded by your money as a taxpayer. While prisons are horrible in their own ways, the lack of real reciprocity here makes the jail time punishment much less satisfying for victims.

4. Isolation

The idea here is that criminally-inclined people must be removed from the mainstream of society, because otherwise they might harm more people with their actions.

Jail time as a criminal sanction probably advances this objective more effectively than all the other objectives. The criminals are indeed removed from the mainstream of society and prevented from hurting people outside of the jail’s walls.

However, I suspect that we could think of a way to advance this objective in a much less expensive and less brutal way. In Old British Imperial times, many convicted criminals were sentenced to ‘transportation’, meaning a one-way journey to colonies such as America or, especially, Australia. This was the British government’s way of getting people they deemed socially dangerous out of the mainstream of British society. It was much less expensive than locking them up in jails, because with ‘transportation’, all the government really paid for was passage to the colony; no guards, secure buildings, free food or other amenities were necessary.

Of course, the modern world is much more crowded than the world of those times was, so old style ‘transportation’ wouldn’t exactly be feasible. However, there does now exist GPS technology that can track the movement and location of people. People under ‘house arrest’ are often fitted with a bracelet connected to a GPS. If they leave the vicinity around their house, the bracelet alerts the authorities, who then impose harsher criminal sanctions on the perpetrator as a result.

Now, imagine that a whole geographical area, much bigger than a single house, was designed as a ‘criminal area’. Convicted criminals, of a certain variety, could be sent to this area, instead of to jail, equipped with a GPS bracelet, and placed under ‘area arrest’. As long as they stayed within this area, the criminals could move around freely and engage in economic activities freely, just as the ‘criminals’ sent to America and Australia in the past could. If they left the area though, the bracelet would alert the authorities, who could then impose a harsher criminal sanction on the escapee. These areas could potentially become manufacturing districts on the outskirts of cities, or agricultural or resource extraction districts in rural regions. This would seem to be a much less expensive and much less harmful way of isolating criminally-inclined people from the rest of society than locking them up in jail.

5. Deterrence

The idea here is for criminal sanctions to be harsh enough to effectively deter people contemplating criminal actions from actually carrying through with those actions.

Locking people up in jail is indeed a pretty harsh sanction, and hence could serve as a deterrent. Most prisons are pretty horrible places, generally filled with the most unpleasant kinds of people. Most prisoners are bored, humiliated, mentally degraded, and fearful. In many prisons, there is a high incidence of prisoner-on-prisoner violence, especially rape.

The thing with deterrence though is that ideally it should just be a by-product of pursuing the other four objectives, not pursued for its own sake. If criminals are to be forced to pay restitution, to be forced into some kind of ‘rehabilitation’, to be on the wrong end of some retribution, and to be isolated from mainstream society, the sanction is probably already going to be harsh enough to satisfy the deterrence criteria sufficiently. As I argued above, jail time is not a very good way of pursing the other four objectives, and hence any deterrence that it achieves is achieved inefficiently.

In addition, jail time is an expensive form of deterrence. If we really want criminal sanctions to deter, ‘eye for an eye’ justice is the cheapest method.  

A Reformed Criminal Justice System

So, what might a reformed criminal justice system, one that relies much less heavily on jail time as a criminal sanction, look like? Well, it would depend on the variety of criminal under consideration.

1. Thieves and Fraudsters

The main sanction for theft and fraud should be restitution-based. The criminal should be forced to either return or pay back the value of the goods misappropriated to the victim, along with money damages for things like apprehension costs, pain and suffering, lost time, etc… For the first two offenses, the free-range restitution methods of either asset seizure or forced installment payment should be used.

For the third offense onward, it would be advisable to isolate this serial thief from mainstream society for a while. They should be sent to a designated area for thieves and fraudsters and placed under area arrest there for at least a year, or longer if they still haven’t been able to pay the restitution yet. Hopefully, there would be opportunities to do some honest economic activity in the area, which would help pay the restitution, and which perhaps might help with the ‘rehabilitation’ of this serial thief.

2. Occasional Violent Offenders

This category consists of people convicted of a violent criminal offense for whom violence is not a settled way of life, but just a temporary aberration. Many murderers and batterers actually fall into this category. For these people, the violent act in question occurs within the context of a very specific set of emotional, relational, and situational circumstances. The murder of a spouse might happen within the context of a very dysfunctional marriage. A severe battery might occur as an excessive retaliation against the deliverer of a verbal insult. None of this is to excuse the violence, but the circumstances surrounding the violence do have a major impact on the recidivism rate of that criminal (rates which, for this reason, are actually quite low for most types of murderers).

For these cases, the victim (or the victim’s family in the case of murder) should be presented with a few choices when it comes to selecting the sanction to be applied to the convicted criminal. The first is for them to invoke the lex talionis and to carry through with the ‘eye for an eye’ justice that it prescribes. The second is for them to invoke the lex talionis but to offer the criminal a pardon in exchange for a mutually agreed-upon sum of restitution money. The third, in case the criminal doesn’t mind having the talionic penalty applied to them too much, is for the victim to opt for the amount of restitution money set forth in a court-provided schedule of restitution payments for every kind of violent offense.

These three choices should only be available for intentional violent crimes. For accidental violent crimes, such as manslaughter, the lex talionis shouldn’t apply and only the third option, restitution from the court-provided schedule, should be available.

If the victim invokes and carries through with the lex talionis, but it can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the supposed criminal was wrongfully convicted, than the wrongfully convicted person or their family should have the right to apply that same penalty to the victim, or to receive the corresponding court-set amount of restitution money. This rule should help rein in the retributive wrath of the victims, especially in cases that aren’t nearly 100% certain. If the victim opted for restitution money, then they should have to pay it back to the wrongfully accused person, with the hopes of recovering it from the real criminal soon instead.          

Occasionally violent offenders who need time to amass the restitution money necessary should be sent to a designated area for occasionally violent offenders and placed under area arrest there until they are able to pay the restitution. Again, hopefully, there would be opportunities to do some honest economic activity in the area, which would help pay the restitution, and which perhaps might help with the ‘rehabilitation’ of this offender.

3. Serially Violent Offenders

Offenders for whom violence is a settled, continuous way of life, such as serial killers and serial sexual predators, need to be permanently removed from mainstream society in order to be prevented from doing any more harm.  If their conviction is very close to certain, they should either be placed under area arrest in a very remote area, such as a part of the Arctic, a remote mountain, or an uninhabited island, or if this is not feasible, just executed outright. The only exception should be if a private individual or group, volunteers to fully fund the incarceration of the offender in a high security prison.

Conclusion

My proposed system might seem bizarre to many, and it certainly is very different from the current system. But I submit that it advances the five main objectives of criminal sanctioning: restitution, rehabilitation, restitution, isolation, and deterrence, far more effectively and cheaply than the current system, which consists mainly of of locking criminals up in prisons.

Sympathizing With the Neglected Victims of Statism

Many people seem to sympathize with members of abstract groupings such as ‘The Poor’ and ‘The Workers’. This sympathy leads them to applaud policies that are perceived to benefit ‘The Poor’ or ‘The Workers’, or other favoured groups, while condemning policies that are perceived to harm members of these groups.

While I too sympathize with people who don’t have many material resources and with people who work hard for a living, I also sympathize with some other abstract groups of individuals, groups who not many others seem to sympathize with. These groups include: The Taxpayers, The Victims of Purchasing-Power Drainage, and The Restricted. The interests of members of these groups are often harmed by interventionist, statist policies that seem to be beneficial to The Poor and The Workers. As a result, my sympathies for members of these three groups often lead me to be more critical of such policies than others.

1. The Taxpayers

I have relatively strong feelings of sympathy for people who do nice things for me. It makes me happy when good things happen to such people, unhappy when bad things happen to such people. I think that this trait is fairly common among humans. It gives rise to the popular sentiments of Gratitude and Loyalty.

I know that as a consumer, my standard of living is based on the actions of the producers. The more they produce, the more the money I earn will enable me to consume. It is true that not every producer contributes directly to producing the products that I seek to buy. However, I know that the market system cannot just cater to my demands alone. In order for it to function, it must cater to the demands of all consumers with purchasing power. Hence, in this instance, I tether my interests to those of consumers in general. Whenever a producer earns a high income by producing things that the consumers want, the system of production for the consumers is advanced. The more this system is advanced, the better off I will be as a consumer. Hence, when I see a producer earning a high income through free-market means, I consider them to be a benefactor, and thus I particularly sympathize with them.

The reason why ‘welfare State’ policies are popular is because their supposed purpose is to ‘help the poor with the money of the rich’. As I’ve argued elsewhere, often these policies are highly overrated as means of benefitting the poor. However, many advocates of ‘welfare State’ policies sympathize so much more with The Poor than they do with the richer Taxpayers that pointing this out does little to dissuade them from their advocacy.

People like me who believe that free-market economic theory is correct and who have a penchant for gratitude-based sympathy will take the interests of the richer Taxpayers far more into account than your typical ‘welfare State’ supporter will. While most of us will also sympathize with The Poor, when it comes to evaluating ‘welfare State’ policies, our sympathy for the richer Taxpayers will lead to more balanced out sympathetic considerations than those of your typical leftist. This, combined with our doubts about the effectiveness of ‘welfare State’ policies as means of helping The Poor, and our greater trust in voluntary action to help The Poor, usually leads us to oppose these kinds of policies.

2. The Victims of Purchasing-Power Drainage

Producers who produce what the consumers want are rewarded with purchasing-power, which they can then use as consumers themselves. This earned purchasing-power can be taken away from these people in two ways: the first is via confiscation of earned currency units, or taxation, which we considered above. The second is via the drainage of the purchasing-power of those earned currency units. The gratitude-based sympathy for The Taxpayer that I have thus also extends to The Victim of Purchasing-Power Drainage.

Purchasing-power can be purposefully drained in two ways: via inflation or via restrictions on production and exchange.

Inflation: When the government (or a private counterfeiter) prints/creates more units of currency, the greater supply of currency, other things equal, will eventually act to reduce the purchasing-power of every unit of currency. This does not happen right away though; first the newly-created currency must flow throughout the economy. It starts this flow from the pockets of the government’s central bank/the private counterfeiter, then moves on to the people they buy from, which then moves on to the people that these people buy from, and so on. The earlier on in this flow you are situated, the better off, as when you receive the benefits of the new money, it is more likely that the new money has not yet raised the price of the things that you want to buy. If you are situated relatively late in this flow, or if you have missed it entirely because you have a fixed income, it is more likely that you will receive the benefit, if at all, only after the new money has raised the price of the things that you want to buy. These people are the ones whose purchasing-power is drained by the inflationary policies.

Restrictions on production and exchange: Whenever government policies make it more difficult for producers to produce what consumers want to buy or to get the products to the consumer, the general purchasing-power of the consumer with a given amount of currency will be relatively impaired. Protectionist tariffs or import quotas, which make it more difficult for consumers to buy from international sources, are probably the most obvious example of these kinds of purchasing-power-draining policies. There are many others though. Policies ranging from professional licensing requirements, to onerous labor and environmental regulations, to taxation or other policies that discourage capital formation and investment, all act to drain the purchasing-power, other things equal, of the currency units of the consumers.      

Advocates of inflationary policies and of policies that restrict production/exchange usually focus on the benefits accruing to certain groups as a result of these policies: from the small business owner that can now get a loan due to the inflationary ‘easy money’, to the domestic producer who is now ‘protected’ from fierce foreign competition, to the worker whose working conditions the labor regulations are intended to ‘improve’.

They usually fail to mention the Victims of Purchasing-Power Drainage that these policies create. Ironically, The Poor and The Workers, the groups that get so much love when they are supposed to be benefitting from government interventions, are the groups that are generally the most sensitive and susceptible to these kinds of purchasing-power drains. Members of these groups are often situated late in the inflationary flow of money, and they are more sensitive to losses in purchasing-power because they didn’t have that much to begin with.

Whether Poor, Worker, or anyone else, I sympathize with all Victims of Purchasing-Power Drainage. I am grateful to producers for providing consumers, including myself, with the goods and services that they do, in exchange for the purchasing-power which we give them in return. When government policies drain the purchasing-power that these producers earned, I feel resentment on their behalf, wishing that my benefactors weren’t treated so shabbily. The fact that these purchasing-power drains are done covertly, a kind of robbery by stealth, makes it even worse in my eyes.

These sympathetic feelings that I, and people who think like me on this issue, have, tend to make us more defensive of the interests of the consumer and the inflation-victim. This makes it more likely that we will oppose the kinds of purchasing-power-draining policies discussed above.

3. The Restricted

This group is comprised of people whose non-aggressively-violent freedom of action is restricted coercively, usually by a government. While my sympathy for the first two groups discussed was based on both understanding (ability to imagine being in their shoes and experiencing the situation in question) and gratitude, my sympathy for this group is based solely on understanding.

I am a free-spirited person and when the government coercively tells me that I can’t do something that does not involve aggressive violence, I feel annoyed and resentful. Thus, I can definitely understand the plight of members of the abstract group, The Restricted, and thus I sympathize with them. This holds even if the freedom being restricted is one that I myself would not choose to exercise, such as the freedom to use recreational drugs.

By contrast, many people only sympathize with those whose particular freedom being restricted is one that they too would choose to exercise, rather than with The Restricted as an abstract grouping like I, and other libertarian-leaning people, do. A North American Christian may be indignant about the freedom to practice Christianity of people in China and the Middle East being restricted, but may not particularly care about people whose freedom to practice religions other than Christianity is being restricted. An American Conservative may bellow indignantly if people’s freedom to keep firearms is being restricted, and yet join the chorus of people who want to restrict people’s freedom to ingest the recreational drugs of their choice.

People like me who sympathize with victims of the restriction of non-aggressively-violent freedom of action in general are more likely to favor more consistently-libertarian policies than people who only sympathize with victims of restriction selectively.       

Conclusion

Why do only some people sympathize with these three abstract groups of people while others do not? Is it because our brains are wired differently from one another? Or is it because one group has thought about the issues at hand more, or from a different perspective, than the other? I for one hope that it is the latter; because then there would be hope for a rapprochement between the two sides. If it’s the former, then we will unfortunately have to agree to disagree.

   

In Defence of the Dark Side of the Force

In the Star Wars series, there are two sides of the mystical Force; the Light Side (the ‘good’ side), and the Dark Side (the ‘evil’ side), used by the Jedi and the Sith respectively. In this article, I am going to do the unthinkable and defend the philosophy of the Dark Side of the Force. This philosophy consists of three main components: egoism, attachment, and drawing strength from the passions.

1. Egoism

ANAKIN: The Sith rely on their passion for their strength. They think inward, only about themselves. 
PALPATINE: And the Jedi don't? 
ANAKIN: The Jedi are selfless . . . they only care about others.[1] 

Wielders of the Dark Side (The Sith) are supposed to be egoists, while wielders of the Light Side (The Jedi) are supposed to be altruists. But there is nothing wrong with being an egoist. Egoists understand that self-enjoyment is the purpose of life and hence are better able to achieve this purpose than altruists, who always think they have to sacrifice themselves for something or other.

Of course, as I’ve stressed elsewhere, being an egoist doesn’t mean that you necessarily disregard the well-being of others. For most people, the well-being of certain others is a crucial part (through sympathy and reciprocity) of their own well-being, and hence as egoists they will still care about the well-being of these others.

2. Attachment

This brings us to the second characteristic of the Dark Side. When wielders of the Force are attached to something or someone, they will fear losing that thing or that person, and this fear will lead them to the Dark Side. Yoda, in Star Wars Episode 1, explains to young Anakin (the future Darth Vader):

KI-ADI : Your thoughts dwell on your mother.

ANAKIN : I miss her.

YODA : Afraid to lose her..I think.

ANAKIN : (a little angry) What's that got to do with anything?

YODA : Eveything. Fear is the path to the dark side... fear leads to

anger... anger leads to hate.. hate leads to suffering.

ANAKIN : (angrily) I am not afraid![2]

Ultimately, Anakin’s attachment to his wife, Padme, is what leads him to the Dark Side. He experiences visions of her dying in child birth and desperately wants to save her. Palpatine, the Sith Lord, tells him how a powerful Sith Lord had figured out how to use the Dark Side in order to cheat death, and how together, using the Dark Side, they could rediscover that power:

ANAKIN: Just help me save Padme's life. I can't live without her. I won't let her die. I want the power to stop death. 
PALPATINE: To cheat death is a power only one has achieved, but if we work together, I know we can discover the secret. 
ANAKIN kneels before PALPATINE. 
ANAKIN: I pledge myself to your teachings. To the ways of the Sith.[3]

So Anakin turns to the Dark Side because he thinks that by doing so, he can save his wife from death. He turns out to be mistaken in this, but is his motive really so wrong? Anakin wants to achieve the power that is necessary to save the life of the woman that he, egoistically, cares deeply about. Wouldn’t we all want such power? Would it really be more commendable if, in that situation, we refused to try to attain that power and let our loved one die without lifting a finger? I don’t think so.

3. Strength from Emotions  

PALPATINE: Are you going to kill me? 
ANAKIN: I would certainly like to. 
PALPATINE: I know you would. I can feel your anger. It gives you focus, makes you stronger. [4]

The Sith get their power from emotions and passions, especially anger and hatred. By contrast, Jedi are taught not to fight with anger or hatred, as doing so is the path to the Dark Side. This theme is illustrated in Star Wars Episode 6 when Luke is fighting Darth Vader in the Emperor’s throne room. Luke is able to fight better and more ferociously against Vader when he is channeling his hatred, and the Emperor loves it because fighting with hatred is the path to the Dark Side.

One must ask though: what is wrong with using anger and hatred to make you fight better? Really experiencing these normal human feelings can actually feel quite exhilarating. When carefully targeted and focused, these feelings are not destructive, and can in fact be quite useful as boosters of strength in a necessary or productive fight, physical or otherwise.

Jedi Hypocricy

ANAKIN: If you're not with me, you're my enemy. 
OBI-WAN: Only a Sith Lord deals in absolutes. I will do what I must.[5]

What absolute? Anakin is just stating a fact: if you’re getting in the way of him achieving his desires, then you are his enemy. What else would you be?

The Jedi are the ones who call the people that they don’t agree with ‘evil’ and the power that they wield ‘dark’, while they pride themselves on being ‘good’ and only wielding ‘light’ power. If this is not dealing in absolutes, I don’t know what is.

Conclusion

The Jedi of Star Wars are similar to the self-righteous, Christian-inspired moralists of the real world. Both preach and crusade against egoism, worldly attachments, and the passions. But I say that these things are the very gist of life itself and are nothing to be ashamed of. So long live the Dark Side!

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[1] http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Star-Wars-Revenge-of-the-Sith.html

[2] http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Star-Wars-The-Phantom-Menace.html

[3] http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Star-Wars-Revenge-of-the-Sith.html

[4] http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Star-Wars-Revenge-of-the-Sith.html

[5] http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Star-Wars-Revenge-of-the-Sith.html