RE: Hey Steemit Libertarians, I debated the death penalty with a conservative...
IMO, the principled libertarian position is to not really have a position. I'm not a court a judge a jury or the family of someone who was killed, so why does my opinion really matter at all?
Things like this are similar to abortion to me, where I can have my personal beliefs of what seems right to me, or what I'm comfortable with, but not necessarily demand that other people do it the same way.
I don't really know how I'd feel if a loved one were killed by someone, but I don't think I'd feel any kind of satisfaction in killing back. I'm sure I'd want them excluded from civil society and for everyone to know what they did. But that seems like the most you can do. Sometimes a situation just isn't correctable.
That said (circling back to my first paragraph) I wouldn't try to stand in the way of people or courts who support the death penalty. It's probably not what I believe is the best way to respond to the situation, but I'm not going to try to make everyone else follow that belief.
If someone wants to kill back, perhaps that's the best way for them to grieve their loss, and perhaps it's best to let them.
interesting take!
Respectfully, I think you're confusing anarchists with libertarians... although 'libertarians' tend to be anarchists in my experience. An anarchist eschews the role of the state like you said, but a libertarian believes that the state, minimal though it may be, has a role to play in protecting its people.
Labels can be confusing. Many minarchist statists describe themselves as "libertarian", ya, but lots of people could describe themselves as that (any Republican who isn't afraid of gay people might identify as "libertarian"), and what does it even mean if you're not using it in a strict/principled way?
A strict use of the word is the same as anarchist.
So I was just using the word strictly, and not in the loosey goosey way that people sometimes use it inside of politics.
Not sure we are helping anything and protecting people by allowing government to kill them. Put it this way, what is lost if the state is prohibited from killing people? Not much, I would think. But I could be wrong.
What is lost is tax dollars that can be used to provide education, healthcare or lowering of taxes incarcerating someone for the rest of their natural days.