| | (Red check sanctions to Phil Osborn for posts 11, 14, and 16.)
I have put off thinking hard and long about the issues involved in a thread perhaps to be called "Conservative or Objectivist: Which are You?" People who want laws have an authoritarian worldview. In terms of the Keirsey/Myer-Briggs, they are "inspector generals" -- they want to know the rules so they can follow them and enforce them. Robert Malcom used the word (from Jacobs) "guardian." Perhaps, my theme should be "Capitalist or Objectivist?" because the Objectivist really wants to discover and follow (and enforce!) the rules whereas the true capitalist is situational and conjecturual. In the words of Ernst Samhaber "the successful merchant does not argue religion with his client." (from Merchants Make History).
For a numismatic project on the coinage of Troyes, I have been researching the medieval fairs. My clue, of course, came from D. T. Armentato's Uncle Sam: the Monopoly Man which tells the story of "fair courts" in which common (ad hoc) decisions restored balance without punishment. No one would come back to a fair to get their nose slit over how many "sheep" are in a "flock." (The case in point is that on the opening day of the fair you offer 12 pence for a flock of 12 sheep to be paid for and delivered on the last day. Meantime, an ewe drops a lamb. Whose is it? Argue it as you will, if the count or king gets involved, everyone loses and someone gets their nose slit.)
The Uniform Commercial Code is an excellent example of what a government can do right. To the extent that it works at all, the basis for it comes from common business law. The case goes like this: You buy a truckload of widgets with a phone call, send along your purchase order and a bank draft. They ship the widgets and send you a sales invoice. The widgets arrive on a bill of lading. You sign for them. What you have is three separate unilateral statements, all of which are contracts and any or all of which can be mutually contradictory on several points. The UCC resolves those problems... or is supposed to.
I am currently majoring in criminal justice in college. I complete an associate's in April. I am also enrolled at a university in a BA program in criminology with a concentration in police administration. I chose that because my interest is in private security. This term, for that degree, I am taking one class in White Collar Crime and another in Sociology of Work. (In private security, the workplace is my 'hood.) Both of those classes only echo what I heard in the lower division classes: when businesses discover crime, they do not report it because (a) they do not want the negative publicity and (b) if the perpetrators are high in the organization, they benefit from status. However true that may be, I have cited here of RoR before a significant study:
"In responding to and resolving the criminal behavior of employees, organizations routinely choose options other than criminal prosecution, for example, suspension without pay, transfer, job reassignment, job redesign (eliminating some job duties), civil restitution, and dismissal...
While on the surface, it appears that organizations opt for less severe sanctions than would be imposed by the criminal justice system, in reality, the organizational sanctions may have greater impact... In addition, the private systems of criminal justice are not always subject to principles of exclusionary evidence, fairness, and defendant rights which characterize the public criminal justice systems. The level of position, the amount of power, and socio-economic standing of the employee in the company may greatly influence the formality and type of company sanctions. In general, private justice systems are characterized by informal negotiations and outcomes, and nonuniform standards and procedures among organizations and crime types."
(Hallcrest Report cited in Introduction to Private Security, Hess and Wrobleski, West Publishing, St.Paul, 1982, 1988.)
In other words, criminals are punished, but not by the courts.
Imprisonment is a failure mode. While better than drawing and quartering, severing of limbs, branding, flogging, etc., etc., prisons are still a consequence of collectivist philosophy. The root of the problem is metaphysical, so arguing "ethics" gets nowhere.
Moreover, I have another university class in community corrections. I also serve on the citizens advisory board for community corrections as an appointee of the county board of commissioners, a post I accepted about two years ago. The theme of the community corrections class is, "they all come back." Unless you intend to kill all perpetrators -- or at least imprison them for life, permanently, and without other recourse -- every convicted criminal returns to the community, in almost every case, within a few hundred meters of where they last left it. So, now what are you going to do?
Rational justice demands more than better laws, better enforced.
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