The Libertarian Party Stance on Capital Punishment
 

Radar, Undertoad and other LPers, past and present...

What is the LP stance on the death penalty and why?

It doesn't have an official stance. (No mention in the complete national platform).

That's sorta why I was asking.

I'd have to guess that they'd be against it. It kind of seriously infringes upon your right to live. It's the most extreme form of government intervention, and that doesn't sound like something that would please Libertarians.

Comitting a capital crime is usually an infringement too.

Most of the Libertarians I know feel that the death penalty is a just punishment for certain crimes such as the kidnapping, rape, and murder of a small girl and burning her body in the desert. But this should ONLY happen when there can't be a doubt. There would have to be more than just witnesses, there would have to be DNA evidence, video tape of the crime, etc.

But then again, most of the Libertarians I know also have no faith what-so-ever in our government to determine whether someone is guilty or not given the failure of the government in almost every single thing they do so most don't trust the government with something like the death penalty.

So those Libertarians I've been mentioning (which includes myself) do agree that death is an appropriate punishment, we don't trust the government enough to allow them to be in charge of something like this for the obvious abuses that could and probably do happen with such power.

I agree with that.

Hey, you gonna sign my new books er wat?

While we're on the subject...

I would also like to know what the official position of the Aloysius Party is toward capital punishment?

I would also like to take this opportunity to sincerely and humbly apologize to Dave, and to any other readers I may have inadvertently offended, for blatantly attempting to hijack this thread.

Does the Aloysius Party endorse capital punishment for thread hijackers? How about the Libertarians?

Then where do we draw the line?

Fundamentally, I am anti-death penalty, because of two reasons: 1) I think its implementation is flawed and 2) it's really just state-sponsored murder.

But I'm not going to shed a tear if the DC-area snipers get put down.

Who can make that choice?

Thread hijacking is okay. I think the AP stance toward capital punishment is "We've only done 3 today, Ol' Sparky's just gettin' warmed up!" :)

For about a decade the LP has not elected a single person to a position where they would have any influence whatsoever on a death penalty law or case.

But the reason there isn't anything in the platform is because it's hard to find consensus amongst LPers on any matter not covered by the non-aggression principle (NAP).

Roughly, the NAP says one does not believe in or advocate the initiation of force as a means of achieving political or social goals. Originally, this sentence fragment was written by party founder David Nolan as a pledge for potential members to sign. It was 1971 and there were a lot of groups that were violently anarchistic, and Nolan wanted to make sure the LP wasn't full of bomb-building students seeking violent overthrow. The LP is about seeking change within the system.

However, over the years the "pledge" morphed into a unifying philosophical theory of sorts. A kind of universal guide to everything from which all other political philosophy springs. LPers routinely apply the NAP to every political question to determine how they should think about it.

For example, how should we think about taxes? Well, the first clear force involved with taxes is when the citizen is forced to pay them. Therefore, tax = force = theft = wrong. (If this doesn't seem exactly right to you, you're not a Libertarian, because the application of a single unifying principle means that everythng becomes very black and white.) (Sidebar for deep navel gazers: the entire question really rests on your thinking on the "social contract" - what, if anything, an individual OWES to his/her society. Part of the LP approach assumes that the NAP means there is NO valid social contract at all. Therefore the non-taxpayer is not initiating force by ignoring the social contract.)

The problem is that the NAP is NOT a good jumping-off point for an entire philosophy. The fact that you CAN develop almost an entire political philsophy from it doesn't mean you SHOULD or that it's CORRECT.

And one example of how the NAP doesn't address everything is capital punishment. Ergo, no entry in the platform.

The LP isn't based on the NAP, although it's an extremely important part of it. The NAP is a great part of the LP but hardly all of it. The fact that the NAP doesn't address the death penalty has nothing to do with the fact that it's not on the party's platform. It has more to do with the fact that the party is very split on the issue. The NAP is a great part of any philosophy but the Libertarian Philosophy is based on far more than this one part.

There is no "social contract" among Americans, and people don't owe money to "society" because we are society. What is best for society is never different than what is best for individuals because society is made up of individuals. Society is not a collective or an entity that has rights or is owed money, etc. Society is a group of individuals who each have rights but the collective has none.

When individuals do what's best for themselves, they are doing what's best for society because they ARE society. We owe nothing to the government and the government isn't entitled to even a single penny of our earnings. All income based taxation is nothing more than armed robbery and nobody has ever proven otherwise.

The Aloysius Party was dissolved by Tob...I think it was because Al was sick after being neutered or something.

In the aftermath, I formed the Sycamore Party, which does not endorse any type of capital punishment. It does support public humiliation for criminals and mental torture, however.

Ok, you have my attention. Can you be a bit more specific? I have my own list but I think it's a bit to harsh.

So, what you're saying here is that you have a perfect job for me in your administration ...