[ExI] anarchy

[Dan TheBookMan]

On Fri, Jun 10, 2016 at 9:48 AM, William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com>
wrote:
> I am against punishment, mostly, for children - if it's the belt kind.
> Taking away privileges works much better for many reasons.  But
> if you want to get rid of corruption you have to penalize and heavily.
> Quick and devastatingly hard punishment will stop the behavior
> more quickly than anything.  Chopping off hands for a bit of
> shoplifting seems extremely harsh, but it's the right idea if the wrong
method.

The problem there would be threefold. One, it seems unjust since the
punishment doesn't fit the crime -- chopping off a hand or two is wildly
out of proportion for shoplifting, even for high end items. It's like
beheading someone for walking across your lawn. Two, it's impossible to
undo the damage in a false positive: you get the wrong person, they lose
their hand or hands, and then what do you do? Three, such a high penalty
would likely make any who still wanting to shoplift to be extremely violent
when confronted or caught. One can easily imagine shoplifters killing
anyone they believe might catch them. Draconian penalties usually make for
those kinds of responses, no?

And it seems a lie to believe these penalties work. The societies that have
them are generally closed ones where the rulers tell you what they want you
to believe about them -- rather than (more or less) open ones where you can
look at the data and folks on the inside can criticize the policies.

> Not to re-enter that discussion, but the biggest problem with Wall
> Street and collapse of 2008 was that there were few if any penalties,
> much less harsh ones.  So why not do it again?  They will.  Oh yes,
> they will.  The incentives to do so are billions of dollars.  Measure
> that against a jail term of a few years, and probably not for the top
people.

Far easier to achieve here might be for the federal government to simply
stop rescuing Wall Street when it gets in these kinds of situations. If
large investors and large firms could lose everything when taking risks --
rather than arguing they're too big to fail -- then they might be much more
cautious in the first place. And when they're not cautious? Well, they'd
lose their position in the market, which would be a lesson to everyone
else. That wouldn't require any special new laws or punishments -- just
letting the market actually work.

> On a related note, I read that many companies are getting into finance
> and out of providing services and products.  Doesn't sound good, but what
do I know?
> Seems private debt is getting worse than national debt.

Debt is really only bad when negative feedback loops are thwarted. Nothing
wrong with borrowing per se, but when folks -- in or out of government --
can borrow and use the tax base to bail them out, then that removes the
negative feedback loop. It prevents error correction and tends to moral
hazard problems. You, as a libertarian, should be well aware of this.

Regards,

Dan
  Sample my Kindle books via:
http://www.amazon.com/Dan-Ust/e/B00J6HPX8M/
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