crime and punishment

If you replace the carrot with the stick in your plan we get the red Chinese plan of last midcentury.  Actually that worked out pretty well I think.  The guys who wrote freakonomics correlated the legalization of abortion with slackening of crime twenty or so years later.  You were speaking of tube tying rather than abortion, but either way we get a decrease in population which can only be a good thing, for reasons you elucidated. 

Of course, as you've said, something like this has zero chance of ever happening because most people, besides us crackpots, would hate it, but we're just a couple of old farts flapping out gums so what the hell.  I do prefer the carrot to the stick if we want this to work, because I don't think we could pay people enough, and if you made it voluntary I don't think enough people would sign up to make any kind of difference.

There is religion, people join that voluntarily and in droves.  There were the shakers, but that points to a problem in keeping the religion going.  There were, and still are, monasteries and nunneries, but I think there was a lot of fooling around going on in them.

Is teen pregnancy a problem?  haven't we always had pregnant teens?  I think you mean unwed teens, and more to the point, poor unwed teens.  Wait a minute, did you say consenting adults?  So only people above a certain age are eligible for the tube tying bonus?  That sounds a little strange.  What if we just signed them up for the pill?  I think we already do that in a lot of cases.

But anyway, poor unwed teens, and maybe even poor wed teens, because the problem is how can poor people raise kids.  Murphy Brown can give her kid whatever the kid wants and can send the kid to the finest schools, and it doesn't even have to hurt her career because she can afford daycare.

See the thing is it kind of comes down to the rich vs the poor.  On the other hand, as people rise into the middle class they begin to have fewer kids.  The kids don't die as much because healthcare is available, and you don't need them to help on the family farm, because likely they have moved off the family farm.


So they are deciding on the death penalty for that Boston guy and the Colorado movie house guy.  Basically I don't give a shit one way or the other if they kill them or let them live out their lives in prison. 

It always seemed a little odd to me that the left would be for abortion and against capitol punishment, and the right the opposite.  Always seemed to be if you were for one you should be for the other.

Unlike the rest of my ilk I have never been that against the death penalty, but with all these guys on death row turning out to be innocent I have changed my mind.  What is it all about?  Do we want to punish the bad people or cut down crime and make us decent citizens safer?  A little of both, some other reason?

I don't think we have ever discussed this before, have we?