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Notes -
[reposting from last week, now with the permanent URL]
For anyone interested, I did my first livestream where I show my face and everything with Counterpoints, a conservative/centrist in Florida who used to be a cop and is now an internet pundit (and WH40k enthusiast). We talk for about an hour and discussed our contrasting experience within the criminal justice system, domestic violence prosecution, drug policing, and very briefly get into race identitarianism.
Relatedly, Counterpoints made a video about the [history of political YouTube] (HE TOOK IT DOWN FOR SOME REASON) which I thought was very interesting look into a phenomenon I hadn't been exposed to much. It's curious to me why this ever became a thing, and why so many online pundits got their start in video game streaming. When Jesse Singal was interviewed by Destiny, they talked for an hour and a half through these tiny viewports, while unrelated Elden Ring gameplay footage played on center stage throughout.
Anyway, it was a fun experience with a format I had never tried before.
One specific criticism:
"I walked down a street with 20 cars, each one with windows smashed - there's no amount of law enforcement funding that could prevent this". The standard hard-right, or moldbug, response is just "that's not true, just put all the people doing that in jail for a long time, that'd stop it" - which is true! It might not be feasible under the constraint of 'we want to be kind to the poor battered homeless addicts', but that's the thing preventing it, not funding.
Also was interesting he explicitly noted an influence of "fascist philsophy" and the "dissident right" - not that I mind, but it's interesting if that's becoming more common among "conservative / centrist" internet people. (obviously, he follows with a "and I don't want either the far-left or far-right to be in power", and means it)
In economics, the formula for how to punish crime has to take into account the chance of getting caught. The idea is that to the extent crime will remain unsolved, you can compensate for that differential by just punishing extra hard the people that do get caught. It makes sense, assuming perfect information and rational actors and blah blah blah.
The problem is that the system will be run by mortals. I had a class with Alex Tabarrok and he tried to argue for the dissuasion effect of the death penalty by saying "How many people would speed if the penalty was death? Zero of course." Well, no. If the penalty for speeding was death, cops will pretend to be blind, prosecutors will pretend they don't know the definition of 'speeding', and judges will curiously start finding all sorts of violations to dismiss these cases. This is sort of what happened in Victorian England where the penalty for sodomy on paper was death, but judges got around that by just writing 'death recorded' — poetically relegating the penalty to also only exist on paper.
So to go back to car prowling, this is a highly opportunistic crime. Any car left parked on the street will forever be vulnerable to have its window smashed, and there is no realistically feasible amount of surveillance that you can implement to sufficiently tamp down on this. Yes, maybe you can install cameras everywhere, hire a cop on every corner, and RFID tag every potential suspect, etc. but obviously the costs mount up. Safeguarding the nation's car windows is not going to be worth that. So if the solution is to compensate for the low risk of getting caught by going HAM on the bozos that do get snared up, you're necessarily going to have to advocate for prison sentences that span several decades and maybe centuries. Then you're just back to the 'death recorded' scenario, because people within the system are just not going to have the appetite to implement this policy.
My alternative of just giving free heroin already exists in the world and would be more effective than trying to scare drug addicts chasing a high with hypothetical eons in prison.
The penalty for speeding is already death, when people who can't drive as well as they think they can try to speed, overtake, drive in bad conditions, etc. But still there are fuckwits who do this, and even if there was an official "break the posted speed limits, death" penalty, you would still get fuckwits doing it because "Hey, maybe the cops aren't out on this stretch of road/I can slow down in time to fool the cameras/I'm good enough to get away with it" and so forth.
We have had the death penalty for as long as we've had any kind of legal system or laws, and that didn't discourage anyone. There may be an argument that without the death penalty, we would have had even more killings and murders, but having the death penalty did and does not mean "zero murders".
And what about the criminals who break into cars or even steal cars, but are not drug addicts? By the same logic, there is no way to prevent this despite any level of policing and surveillance, so do we throw up our hands and give them free stuff too? "Joe only steals and lies and cheats and defrauds because he's a poor heroin addict, if he got free heroin he'd never do that stuff". Yes, he would. Give Joe enough free heroin to maintain himself, where 'if I take more, I'll overdose' and Joe will look for other drugs to get that high that he can't get anymore from heroin. So unless we commit to giving Joe a range of free, pure drugs, then he'll go right back to robbing and stealing to feed his habit. There is a risk of methadone addiction and overdose, because junkies chase that high and will try anything, even if they're on something specifically prescribed to treat opioid addiction.
"Jim isn't an addict but he breaks into cars, robs, steals, cheats, and defrauds because he's a career criminal. If we only gave him free shit then he wouldn't do that any more". Would you recommend this policy, also?
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