The basic and original purpose of Justice was to prevent anarchy by providing an intermediate arbiter for retaliation. Its second and modern purpose is to protect witnesses and victims. Its third purpose it to stop further crime from being committed.
Vigilantism was a problem in the ancient world, and continues to be a problem where justice is lax. The Code of Hammurabi was created in ancient Babylon specifically for the purpose of maintaining good order, which is the same as preventing vigilantism. The Code is notably strict in order to serve this purpose. The problem with liberal compassion on the subject of justice is that with any amount of compassion towards criminals which exceeds the normal sentiment of victims regarding justice, the purpose of justice is undermined with that compassion. In other words, exceeding the victim's tolerance level for compassion toward their attacker, threatens to destroy social order by inviting a vigilante response.
It is also, in many cases, unrealistic to tolerate the criminal as no guarantee can be made that he or she will return the favor and refrain from committing crimes. An example concerning liberals over-acceptance of compassion is the opposition of many on the left to the death penalty. This opposition ignores the fact that there are gang and organized crime bosses who can have victims and witnesses killed from prison. In such a circumstance it is unrealistic to expect the victim to live in fear. The Witness Protection Program is a testament to the incompetence and failure of the justice system to perform the entire function that its creation serves, to protect, prevent, and stop vigilantism (the only reasonably position to take when one life, property, or family is in jeopardy.)
Criminals have almost no rights while incarcerated. Every now and then you hear that the left is asserting the rights of a criminal and a judge agreeing with them. How could, for example, a criminal have the right to free speech? Thus, an imprisoned child molester has the right to write a sick letter to his victim - a gang boss to place a phone call to a hit man to execute your loved one. Giving rights to criminals undermines the penalty effect of justice - the one thing that motivates the criminal not to come back to prison, and invites abuse of others and the system. With the exception of enumerated, and entirely procedural rights, convicted criminals only have privileges while incarcerated.
This is also illogical. The most basic rights are the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. When a man is incarcerated he looses his right to liberty, when put to death, he looses his right to life. The pursuit of happiness becomes difficult without either. The only rights that a criminal has are those spelled out in the Constitution itself.
Prior to conviction the accused has all his or her rights, except possibly liberty. (This depends on whether or not bail is granted.) Those rights are trial by jury, habeas corpus, and the ones listed below. Once convicted the criminal only has the following rights: the right to appeal, freedom from cruel and unusual punishment, and the right to petition. Those who wish to interpret the document as a living Constitution forget that they are not as smart as the framers. The Constitution is a philosophical document as much as a legal one. The "living constitution" people forget that the only reason they want the right to interpret it according to their whim, is because they do not understand its purposes and articles to begin with. As usual the liberal practices his dogma of challenging every notion - only to conveniently forget to answer the question. He asks, "why do we do things like this?" then fails to find the reason. There is always a good reason why it is done that way when it comes to this document.
At any given time a culture has a thousand neurosis on the subject of justice, and those in rebellion to justice even more so. Its function to the individual is to protect everyone equally, as the week cannot protect themselves. The most competitive system on earth is anarchy, the least competitive system is communism. In anarchy there is a vicious competition to the death as every man jockeys for power in an environment of unlimited violence. Anarchy is really a transitional form or social order. It is not stable, and is always a prelude to the rise of a dictatorship that will become monarchy over time. Justice eliminates the competition to murder and creates the mild competitive condition called freedom.
Its second function is to provide retaliation to the individual so he can be relieved and protected. This is another thing overlooked by the liberal. Retaliation provides satisfaction or relief of a sort to the victim or their family. This is worthy in itself when an injustice has occurred, in fact, done properly it can be therapeutic.
All justice must uphold the rights of the individual. Only individuals can have rights. This is because the assertion of minority group rights uses self-contradictory logic. The smallest minority is the individual, and since the creation of minority rights in the form of group rights threatens the individual's rights, no group right can be legitimate, because the individual is the smallest minority. It is self-contradictory to subscribe to minority rights in multiple ways. Groups aka. (minorities) are composed of individuals. Majorities are composed of individuals. It is the individual who bleeds, not the minority or majority. These terms are just abstract concepts that do not exist in reality. Giving a right to an abstract concept is an invitation to abuse of actual flesh and blood persons. Abstract concepts do not have bodies. It is the individual who has a body, and it is the individual whose body is broken by authority. Rights are a right to the control of ones body, and to the control of the possessions that clothe and feed that body. No right can ever be legitimate when it leads to the breaking of bodies or attack against the body of an innocent. Furthermore, group rights have existed before - having been called the divine right of kings, and the rights of slave owners respectively. Such group rights invariably serve to elevate a group at the expense of another, and indeed that is the true and secret purpose of the concept.
Tyranny takes many back-doors into a free society, and always does so with muddled and poorly defined fad philosophy concepts. Ideas that appear new are really much older, as the same tyrannical ideas are continuously repackaged by every liberal and idealistic group within each generation that falls in love with tyranny and with the impulse to create perfection on earth, an impulse that has been responsible for every mass-murder revolution, inquisition, crusade, and jihad that has ever been waged. The impulse to save the world always destroys it, as societal perfection is unobtainable due to the imperfection inherent in every human being.
Power in a zero-sum game, there are only so many people to rule and only so much they can be made to do. With the exception of revolutions, generally no vast increase or decrease of power by government over its citizens occurs within a system. Economies are not a zero-sum game. In the economy wealth is constantly being created by technology and the production of people. The liberal often confuses the two and believes that economics is zero-sum. This is because he is relatively unproductive and oft destructive and thinks success is accumulated through power and not production.
There are three basic concepts that govern a free society, they are; negative liberty, rights, and freedom. Negative liberty is simply the act of a society that leaves its non-forceful persons alone. The non-forceful are those that do not initiate force against others - save in self-defense. Rights are those prohibitions on force that preserve negative liberty, aka, the right of the non-forceful to be left alone. A right can never be an obligation to a benefit or claim against the property and money of others. Besides the obvious immorality of establishing a right to a benefit (such as welfare or health care), it is entirely impractical because it depends on the fiscal action of often incompetent politicians and results in the mass accumulation of societal and government debts. It is also hypocritical. The person who wants a handout demands that politicians overcome their inclination to accumulate debts and pass that debt to the next office holder. They demand this in spite of the fact that the very same person who demands a government benefit would punish their leaders by voting against the one that exercises fiscal restraint and self-discipline: the very self-discipline required to run such a welfare state properly. They demand that the politician exercise self-discipline and an almost saint like disposition toward national finances while simultaneously being unable to exercise that same discipline in their own finances and provide the benefit themselves. They demand that the politician overcome human nature in order to serve the most vile and lazy impulses of their own nature. The name for this attempt to establish a right to a benefit is called positive liberty - a misnomer since it is neither positive nor liberty.
Positive liberty and negative liberty are mutually exclusive concepts and completely incompatible. Any right to a benefit comes at the expense of the right to be left alone since that benefit requires forcing the non-forceful to pay for it. It is also morally self-contradictory. If one establishes a right to a benefit on the basis of fairness; is it not unfair to the person who pays more than they receive? If on the basis of compassion, is it not cruel to those who pay against their will? This continues with any moral or ethical concept you apply. It is the most flagrantly hypocritical idea and those who push "fairness" or "compassion" are really just pushing "compassion for me at your expense." Positive liberty is the mindset of a criminal. Positive liberty leads to positive tyranny, and does do both in its own right, and because the act of using force against another engenders it opposite - people fight back. For example, attempting to over-regulate a business invites lobbyists to defend their industry and then in turn demand special handouts. Imposing on the right of others invites them to impose on you. For example: affirmative action was harmful to the careers of white males for the supposed purpose of correcting discrimination. The same affirmative action could be used to force conservative teachers into the classroom to remedy the injustice caused by an environment of liberal academics often openly hostile and discriminatory to conservative professors.
Only negative liberty can work because only it does not cost anything financially or socially, and does not engender an opposite reaction. All positive liberty either engenders opposite reaction or has financial cost. A thing that costs money can never really be practical as a human right.
Only negative liberty can work because only it does not cost anything financially or socially, and does not engender an opposite reaction. All positive liberty either engenders opposite reaction or has financial cost. A thing that costs money can never really be practical as a human right.
Liberty is the act of being left alone by government and free from force, rights are those limitations on government that serve liberty, and freedom is the condition of having both liberty plus rights. Liberty + rights = freedom. Positive liberty, or the "right to a just society," or the "right to equality," is predicated on a false assumption that the world is unfair. In a free society without endemic corruption this is false. Those that succeed do so precisely because they deserve to: because hard word, persistence, and most importantly, producing a product that society needs has made them profitable. The liberal believes that large corporations are bad because they are profitable, when it is precisely their profitability that makes them a value to society. What people spend money on is what they actually value, and businesses that make vast amounts of money do so by delivering massive positive social value for society.
The market works because every dollar is a vote, with the proceeds going to the business that produces the most valuable and needed items. Without this mechanism nations would starve, and indeed, in centrally planned socialist economies they have. Greed feeds because it sends food to the hungriest person, who, because of their hunger is willing to pay more. When societies starve it is not because of the market, but because of government actions that have the effect, always intentional, of causing it. When there is a massive surplus that causes obesity, it is because of government subsidies. The market may not be perfect, but it is less stupid than the average liberal who wishes to modify it. Natural equilibrium generally always beats interference. This is so often the case it should be taken as the default position until proven otherwise.
Justice always exists within government, and since not all governments are created equal it behooves us to define what types of government there are and the effects of those types. This task is already done for us to some degree by past philosophers. No single universal definition exists that is adequate, but rather there are three as follows. The first could be called abusive government, defined by the Fourteenth century Islamic political philosopher Ibn Khaldun as; "an institution which prevents injustice other than such as it commits itself." This definition is wholly appropriate for the time he lived, and still so for many nations.
The second definition of government could rightly be called the definition of social government, socialist government and all false democratic societies where the tyranny of the majority prevails, it is provided to us by the Ninetieth century French philosopher Frédéric Bastiat in his treatise on The Law as: “government it the great fiction by which every person tries to live off the other.”
The third definition comes from no particular source and would say that “government is a protection racket.” This could be called the definition of criminal government.
The fourth is Republic, and if I may define it; "a republic is that from of government that protects the non-forceful person from both the force of others and the force of itself.”
Within the field of government, there are four forms of action. Each of these represents a moral or immoral behavior and moreover, affects the entire health of a society. They are;
Crime, which can be defined as scarifying the future gain for the present gain. All criminal actions can be shown to have some element of wasting future gain for present gain. The man who sets the store on fire for the insurance money sacrifices future profitability of his store and some of the future profitability of his insurance company, as well as committing fraud and breaching his agreement, for a quick payout. The meth dealer sacrifices the health and well-being of his customer for profit. The criminal broker sacrifices the financial well-being of his clients for a temporary payout. The only time it can be justified to sacrifice some future benefit is when it is debt as an investment. In this case, a debt is taken on to invest in a future gain.
Investment; or sacrificing the present for future gain, is not justifiable when it serves crime.
Pure creation, a possibly nonexistent phenomena, that is, creating to create.
Pure destruction, destroying to destroy, the activity of psychopaths, all destroying to destroy is really destroying to create something to destroy. Real destroying to destroy also probably does not exist. Regardless of whether or not those involved in justice realize it, all justice relies on the process of assessing the worth of the individual based on social standards codified into law, and based on these four forms of actions: two of which are immoral. A person whose actions are deemed to be more destructive to society than constructive is locked up. Also, a person is always jugged based on action, not opinions or identity, except when such identity is destructive - such as a spy or communist revolutionary.
Justice has great potential for abuse. Time and history in western civilization as well as an American revolution have come to limit the scope of what justice can do. These lessons are based on historical memory of what worked. When done properly it leads to a cooperative society, and done improperly, it leads to a lack of respect for the law, the rise of vigilantism, and the creation of corrupt regimes. However, the individual may want benefits at his neighbors expense, and she endorses a system that will eventually abuse her or her offspring.
It must follow the morals of the public in order to be respected. It must be slow to change its standards and avoid bandwagons. It must not abuse the innocent no matter how perverse the publics standards become. Maintaining standards is the role of education, maintaining order and freedom for future generations is the role of justice.
