8 Jul
2001
8 Jul
'01
11:23 a.m.
If society were to take this kind of horrible intolerable turn, I would be
forced to take up arms. I would kill as many people as I could (it would
be quite a few, I think. Myself and a couple other intelligent people
might be able to think up ingenious ways of destroying, if necessary.) and
then I would happily go off to the executioner. If the penalty was the
former of your two examples, I would make sure to produce absolutely
nothing.
Peace... Sridhar
On Sun, 8 Jul 2001, Richard Erlacher wrote:
The trick is to assign a penalty so severe that all
people, no matter how many
trillions they have, will not want to pay it, and that, having paid the penalty,
they will absolutely not make the choice to do that again. I can only think of
one such penalty, though there are many ways of administering it.
For example, if the fine for speeding were 100% of all your personal holdings,
irresprctive of how much that might be, including clothing and other personal
belongings, and 95% of all you earn or otherwise acquire for the next 30 years,
assuming you can survive that long on only 5% of what you acquire, you might not
choose to speed, particularly since it would require you to watch your children
starve, if they hadn't already. It would be costly and diffucult to exact that
penalty, while a quick bullet between the eyes would be easy and simple. If a
mistake were made, well, a posthumous apology would have to suffice.
Dick