Tim Griffiths <T.G.Griffiths@exeter.ac.uk> writes:
Jim Choate wrote:
Which means we should have the lowest number of incarcerated individuals instead of the most.
Does it? Or does it mean that we potentially have 49% of the population in jail for any particular act, deemed to be a crime by the remaining 51%?
Sounds about a reasonable an outcome as can be expected from a distortion of market economics such as democracy. Probably it would stabilize somewhere below 49% unless methods can be found to extract enough money from people in jail by having them work. The real problem as I see it with democracy is that not only do your neighbours get to vote to have you locked up for something which is none of their business, and has no conceivable effect up on them; but they actually get to vote for you to be charged for the "service" of being locked up to protect you from yourself. There is a trend of making the "criminal" (the real victim in many cases) finance his own persecution. For example we have licensing regimes which are not in our interests, and you know what, they charge for a license, and they lock people up for not buying licenses. And what is really galling is that the poor sods who get locked up actually fund the process, lose money by being locked up and pay two or three times for someone elses control freakish whims. The wild west was better than this state of affairs -- people didn't have the energy or inclination to waste their own resources being nosy parkers, and those that did were apt to wind up full of lead. Perfect. (Crime rate was reportedly pretty damn low too.) Adam -- Now officially an EAR violation... Have *you* exported RSA today? --> http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/ print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<> )]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`