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Politics : Libertarian Discussion Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: The Philosopher who wrote (4367)	11/1/2000 2:13:47 AM
From: Don Lloyd	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 13056

CH - On the one hand, it sounds outrageous. But remember, Libertarians do require a high emphiasis on individual responsibility and accountability to go with our stress on individual liberty. And leaving a gun in a car in a school parking lot is an invitation to somebody to come along and do something stupid. It IS outrageous, period. It took me several hours to come up with an explanation for how you could come to such an obviously flawed conclusion, but a theory has presented itself. As a lawyer, it is reasonable to suspect that you may have a different view of the law than we non-lawyers do. To a lawyer, the body of law is a tub of LEGO blocks to be selected and assembled for a particular purpose. That purpose is to either punish, or not punish, as the case may be, a particular defendant. The winning side is the one that produces a more satisfying and elegant assemblage of blocks. Common sense and truth are utterly irrelevant to the outcome, except as a jury may succeed in slipping its bonds. Simplifying, the PURPOSE of Law is PUNISHMENT. As a non-lawyer, my view is entirely different. First, all laws and rules are the guidelines within which government exercises the monopoly that it has been granted on the use of force. Like government itself, all rules and laws are necessary evils, required by the fact of the imperfectability of man. From this viewpoint, the PURPOSE of Law is DETERRENCE. PUNISHMENT is merely a MEANS to that END, not an END in and of itself. If, in a particular case, specific deterrence is achieved without full or even any punishment, and general deterrence is not substantially endangered by the lack of full punishment, then punishment should not be fully applied. In the case at hand, there can be NO argument that the defendant needs to be punished in order be deterred, since his theoretical violation was entirely unconscious and unintended. What we really have in this case is a number of authority figures who are entirely convinced that the exercise of judgement and common sense are NOT part of their job descriptions and to exercise same might expose them to personal risk of unpleasant results and the possible requirement of such exercises again in the future. It is much safer to run in the pack, following the long worn ruts of exalted rules, protected by the numbers of their own kind and shielded behind the printed pages that pre-program their every action. Regards, Don