Is capital punishment OK?
It would be if I ran things.
In fact, I'd increase the scope of capital offenses. These days, unless you're in Texas, you have to rape and murder an entire busload of kids before you're sent on a date with Old Sparky.
Take HOV lane violators. There's nothing equivocal about their actions. Either you have the requisite number of individuals in your car or you don't. Either you're driving an HOV-legal vehicle or you're not. You might argue that timed HOV lanes are a little tricky. If the carpool laws apply at certain times, then you might give folks a 15 minute grace period at the beginning and end.
No one can argue that they drove illegally in the carpool lane out of ignorance. See, although driving is commonplace, the act of piloting 3500 pounds of steel, glass, and explosive fuel is not trivial. To get a license to drive, you're required to pass tests demonstrating that you know the rules of the road. Besides, the responsibility to know those rules rests on the driver, tests or no. If somehow you make it to the road without learning about HOV lanes, helpful signs posted along the road fill you in on all the details.
And don't try to engage me in an argument about the validity or utility of HOV lanes. If you're one of those "I have a constitutional right to drive" morons, then you're more stupid than I want to deal with. If you argue that all the cars sitting and idling in the regular lanes waste more energy and produce more pollution than saved with the HOV lanes, then you don't know the meaning of the word "incentive" and I'm surprised you're intelligent enough to eliminate successfully on a regular basis. If you want to argue that your taxes help pay for the highway and you should be able to drive wherever the hell you want, then you have Libertarian issues beyond my ability to tolerate.
Besides, I'm running things here, so shut the hell up.
The majority of drivers obey the HOV lane rules either because they respect the law and know what is right or they fear being pulled over and ticketed. The law-abiding folks crawl along in regular lanes, listening to radios, wishing they'd brought something to record the to-do list items and story ideas that kick around inside their heads, and burning with the desire to execute carpool violators. The HOV lane remains relatively free.
To the potential carpool violator, this situation presents two antagonistic tableaux. On the one hand, it demonstrates that the lawful thing to do for a solo driver is to hang out in the regular lanes. On the other hand, it frustrates the hell out of the incipient scofflaws, taunting them with a promise of quick passage and a chance to get ahead of the pack. After all, you're not really getting anywhere unless you're passing other people.
So people with frayed moral fiber duck in and out the HOV lane to pass cars that irritate them. Drivers whose moral fiber has been masticated to the consistency of peanut butter just drive in whichever lane is most convenient for them.
I love to watch carpool violators when they catch sight of a prowling highway patrol car or a motorcycle cop hidden in plain sight just below a rise in the road. The crowded lanes of traffic on their right are no longer a herd of stupid sheep, but a wall of solid steel, each brick in the wall commanded by a gleeful and righteous driver who is unlikely to let the now desperate violator scoot over.
How many HOV lane violations do you think we'd have if, instead of ticketing the culprit, the peace officer hauled the violator off into the bushes and shot them in the base of the skull, Brazilian-style?
You might have a few high-speed chases, but I think you'd see far fewer solo drivers in the HOV lanes and even more people taking the bus or train.
As you can tell, there's certain level of moral disregard or dysfunction that I'm not willing to tolerate. If you don't make the grade, then you're worth more to society as cat food. Are you borderline developmentally impaired and violent? Grindy-grindy time for you. Your parents gang-raped you and now you hurt others? Heeere, kitty, kitty!
Some more examples of what I'm talking about: Jeffrey Skilling? Cat food. Kenneth G. Hinson, that guy who kidnapped those two teenage girls and kept them in a backyard dungeon? Cat food. In fact, he'd have been the most tender of vittles very soon after his first conviction for raping an 11-year-old girl in 1991. Thomas Hose, the guy who kept a 14-year-old girl captive for 10 years? Cat food. People who litter, including flicked cigarette butts? Cat food. Identity thieves? Cat food.
Of course, all this assumes that I'm running things and by "running things" I mean that I'm omniscient and omnipotent. Because I'm neither, I think capital punishment is bad.
Instead of living in my personal paradise of Pakehavania, I live in the United States. In order to live here in peace with a U.S. passport, a mortgage, and a Honda Accord, I've given up certain freedoms. We all give up something (or have something taken from us) for the advantages of living under a government. The state decides whether or not you have broken laws and you need to lose your liberty. The state decides how long you have to stay in school. The state decides how much time you spend working to support it by taxing you. The state decides how land is to be used through eminent domain, regardless of what you think you own. Some states decide the languages you speak, the religion you practice, the food you eat, and how you breed. In the U.S., the state still decides whether you live or die.
I have issues with this. I like the U.S. better than any country in the world so far. I believe in and appreciate many of the principles on which the country was founded and by which it tries to operate. But like any institution, it is far from perfect.
Here's the crux of my problem. All institutions have their failings, whether it's greed or zealotry or bureaucratic pedantry. Also, institutions tend to act according to their own self interests, which don't necessarily coincide with my interests. I barely trust the state to spend my tax dollar wisely. I sure as heck don't trust the state with the explicit power over life and death.
Death is currently too final an issue for humans and human systems to handle. Just look how death has been used in history. As the U.S. continues to move towards a twisted, oligarchic anarcho-capitalism, I wonder how long it will be before the state contracts with some huge multi-national corporation to provide the quality life-cessation services that inmates deserve and that only the global free market can provide.
So what's the cost of abolishing the death penalty? On a practical level, death row inmates live a long time after they're sentenced anyway. Extending their stay and integrating them into the prison population might ultimately be more expensive, but consider that the convicts tend to sort things out on their own: "On August 23, 2003, while in protective custody at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Shirley, Massachusetts, John Geoghan [ex-priest and serial child molester] was trapped in his cell, strangled and stomped to death by Joseph Druce..." Go psycho, Neo-Nazi murderer dude!
On an ideological level, if you're the religious type, you should rest assured in your G*d's ability to sort the bastards out after they croak of natural causes. Either they roast forever in perdition or come back as specimen of Placobdelloides jaegerskioldi, the hippo-infesting rectal leech. If you're the secular type, I'd think you'd be rational enough to see that death's value as punishment, deterrent, or retribution is negated by the stain it leaves. As Ghandi put it: "I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent."
No society that employs the death penalty can be considered wholly civilized.
Pakeha