The Ideas Blog

Okay, maybe I was mistaken.


I've been reading David Friedman's Ideas blog which seemed to have some interesting aspects. It does, but not in David's ideas which, at least so far, fall into a series of logical fallacies I expect from folks like Travis, but not from an actual expert.

His capital punishment argument is based on a set of emperical assumptions, none of which are backed up with evidence, e.g. mistakes are rare, killing a criminal saves lives, refering to made up or discredited data etc. He simply sidesteps or takes off the table other points which are valid but don't support his point, e.g.

I have ignored a fourth argument against the death penalty—that it doesn’t deter—since I believe the factual claim is probably false.

No, his arguments are not persuasive. However, the comments are very interesting and often offer a better insight into libertarianism than David does.

e,g,
In principle, there can always be false positives in death penalty convictions. I find this flies in the face of the principle of inviolability, which I think in fact underlies much of the libertarian ethics that this country is founded upon (and rightfully so).This principle states that you have a natural right not to be imperiled, by no fault of your own. This goes even for lofty principles of "deterrence"--which, taken too far, becomes an essentially socialist concept ("We can lower the crime rate in society by making examples of people who we think committed similar crimes").

The "breaking a few eggs" side of making this justice omelette is allegedly justified because if the state is seen as waivering, the system evolves to something costly and lengthy as it is in the US now.

Personally, I think the high cost of execution is simply a type market force evaluating a human life. This is good, im my opinion, becuase it seems to set the bar currently on the side of correcting mistakes and I am unconvinced by hand waving arguments that as long as more guilty get killed than innocent thats okay. However, the calculus may chnage in the future when the planet is more crowded and the value of life is "cheaper". Historically the US has been under-populated with relatively few high density populations areas compared to Europe or Asia. If that changes, I would expect to see opinions on the death penalty start to swing the other way.


The post I'll ding here from David's blog is the one on public schools and the First Amendment. he creates a false dichotomy, i.e. teaching science is, de facto, teaching a religion because science falsifies biblical literalism.

This is nonsense. No major religion crumbled when the world was proven round or that we live in a heliocentric solar system, although some did change a little. Education, if done well, gives you tools for understanding the world. It is perfectly possible to get a really good secular education and retain one's religious and philosophical convicitions. Atheists compose a mere 4% of the overall population. By David's argument, that means only 4% of us are actually educated.

What crap. And what an insult to educated people of faith.