MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Posts Tagged ‘welfare system’

Stopping Murderers – The Postil Magazine

Posted by M. C. on December 5, 2022

The solution to this objection to the death penalty is to employ it only when we are certain of guilt.

Wow! Aren’t all guilty verdicts based on a convinced jury? And then you have this

https://www.thepostil.com/stopping-murderers/

Walter E. Block

There has been a spate of even more unusually horrendous mass murders in recent days, topped off by the monstrousness that occurred in Uvalde, Texas to school children and teachers. But pretty much every weekend there are reports from Chicago, Baltimore, New Orleans and other cities run by Democrats of shootings, sometimes stretching into the dozens.

What is going on here, and, more important, how can this be stopped, or, at least, the incidence of this phenomenon radically reduced?

One obvious point is to vote out the “progressive” wokesters in the next election. They have been undermining the morale of the police, trying to deprive them of financial resources by “defunding” them, turning prisoners loose, downgrading felonies to misdemeanors, etc. Before these politicians seized the city reins, there were fewer such murderous outbursts.

Another is to harden the targets. There should be one and only one entrance to a school, and there ought to be an awake guard posted right there. Arming teachers and staff would also go a long way in the direction of dissuading criminals from entry. Left wing politicians oppose these safety measures, but we can pretty much ignore their hypocritical criticisms: they surround themselves with armed guards.

If drugs were legalized, all of them without exception, there would be fewer murders. We have as evidence for this contention the example of booze. Under prohibition, gangs shot each other over turf. Does this now occur at liquor stores? Of course not.

Then there is the break up of the American family, or, worse, its failure to form in the first place. This is due to our welfare system. We had this program in effect for many years, with little ill effect on the family, but Lyndon Baines Johnson, another Democrat, greatly enhanced it in the mid-1960s. Then the family started falling apart. All too many kids nowadays grow up without a dad in the house. A non-intact family is causally related to all sorts of societal ill effects: crime to be sure, but also unemployment, lack of schooling, divorce, etc. Unhappily, if we were to end this pernicious program, it would take a generation or more for the beneficial impact on crime reduction to take place, given the negative social mores introduced in its wake.

Is there no other alteration that can have more immediate effects? Fortunately, there is: public executions. There will be a great hue and cry against implementing any such policy. One objection will be that if a mistake is made, the wrong person will be put to death. But to err is human. There are cases when an innocent man was incarcerated for decades; it hardly follows that no one should be in jail. Also, some of these folks were guilty of other equally serious crimes, and merely punished for the wrong one of many. The solution to this objection to the death penalty is to employ it only when we are certain of guilt.

See the rest here

Be seeing you

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Selected Gems By Thomas Sowell

Posted by M. C. on May 4, 2020

sowell

https://www.azquotes.com/author/13901-Thomas_Sowell

It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.

 

Racism is not dead, but it is on life support — kept alive by politicians, race hustlers and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as ‘racists’

 

What do you call it when someone steals someone else’s money secretly? Theft. What do you call it when someone takes someone else’s money openly by force? Robbery. What do you call it when a politician takes someone else’s money in taxes and gives it to someone who is more likely to vote for him? Social Justice.

 

It is bad enough that so many people believe things without any evidence. What is worse is that some people have no conception of evidence and regard facts as just someone else’s opinion.

 

I have never understood why it is “greed” to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.

 

If you believe in equal rights, then what do “women’s rights,” “gay rights,” etc., mean? Either they are redundant or they are violations of the principle of equal rights for all.

 

In the long run, the greatest weapon of mass destruction is stupidity.

 

Politics is the art of making your selfish desires seem like the national interest.

 

What the welfare system and other kinds of governmental programs are doing is paying people to fail. In so far as they fail, they receive the money; in so far as they succeed, even to a
moderate extent, the money is taken away.

 

A recently reprinted memoir by Frederick Douglass has footnotes explaining what words like ‘arraigned,’ ‘curried’ and ‘exculpate’ meant, and explaining who Job was. In other words, this man who was born a slave and never went to school educated himself to the point where his words now have to be explained to today’s expensively under-educated generation.

 

‘Fair’ is one of the most dangerous concepts in politics. Since no two people are likely to agree on what is ‘fair,’ this means that there must be some third party with power – the government – to impose its will. The road to despotism is paved with ‘fairness’.

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