Kurt M. Weber

It certainly is proportional. All (legitimate) crimes are morally equivalent to murder. Consider this: Let's say I make $10/hour (I'm choosing nice round numbers so I can do the math in my head more easily). Let's say also that someone comes in and steals, say, a loaf of bread from me that cost $2.00. That's 12 minutes of my life that has been just rendered null and void. How is that any different than if, instead of stealing the bread, the thief had just killed me twelve minutes before I would otherwise have died? Sure, twelve minutes isn't that much. But why does the remaining life span of the victim affect the vileness of murder? If you accept that it does, you have to accept that someone who murders a 90-year-old Alzheimer's patient in a nursing home is morallly superior, however slightly, to someone who murders a 30-year-old in excellent health--a position utterly empty of any rational basis. Furthermore, perhaps you might say that "Well, you could get the bread--or at least compensation equivalent to the value of the bread--back." But what if I couldn't? Perhaps I die of a heart attack, totally unrelated to this theft, before the thief is caught and convicted or restitution can be made. How am I supposed to get the value of those twelve minutes back then? So if theft is equivalent to murder, then equivalent punishments are in order. An appropriate punishment for a thief/murderer is, of course, death (assuming the individual actually IS guilty; how one determines that with certainty is an important question, but not one that affects the validity of the principle). Once he is dead, he no longer has any use for his property; furthermore, since he has renounced his humanity by committing his particular crime he cannot claim the right to dictate how his property is disposed of--thus he is not entitled to will it to someone or give it as a gift before his death. How so?

What I've always advocated: 1) Seizure of the assets of convicted (legitimate) criminals, to be held in escrow until the criminal's death so they can be returned to him should his conviction be overturned. This, of course, has the problem that if someone is planning on committing a criminal act, he can simply transfer the assets to another before he commits his act--but then, if the recipient is aware of his reasons for the transfer and accepts them anyway, he could be considered an accessory or even a conspirator. 2) Offering loans to private individuals and entities, provided that the initial capital is obtained noncoercively and government does not use the fact that it has lots of men with guns and tanks to bully itself into a better position in the loan market than it could otherwise obtain. If you've managed to prevent government from simply going out and collecting taxes in the first place then this shouldn't be too hard to do. 3) Government operating as a self-contained economy, mining for itself all the raw materials it needs and using those to produce what items it needs to operate, and selling the surplus for additional revenue.

The quality of one's character does not in and of itself affect the quality of his work.