Quote:
Originally Posted by peter12
Well fair enough, I was just adding to your point. No need to be like that.
|
Sorry, but that came across as a total non sequitur. There is no real consensus among libertarians on criminal law, with a wide spectrum of opinions going from aggressive support for capital punishment to a preference for restorative justice, whereby there are no prisons but criminals are responsible for compensating their victims - sort of a modern weregild system, I suppose.
However, I think any plausible libertarian society probably *would* just kill people like this, as it wouldn't make economic sense to keep him in prison, and the Randian form of libertarianism so dear to the North American heart is all about maximizing economic efficiency. While the literature and historical thought on the subject of libertarian criminal law does tend towards the aforementioned restorative type of justice rather than retributive, this I think (with absolutely no evidence other than my own completely unsupported theorizing) is much akin to the Marxist dream of the "withering away of the state" - it would fall apart under the press of reality and end up in tyranny.
To my mind, libertarianism is the mirror image of Marxism, and won't work for the exact same reasons Marxism doesn't work - it assumes that people are rational. In Marxism, the big mistake is thinking people won't try to cheat the system; in libertarianism, the mistake is thinking you solve that by minimizing the system you can cheat.
Not that this has much to do with the original subject, of course.