CHINA EXECUTES THREE FILIPINO ‘DRUG MULES’ ― DEATH PENALTY AS A BARBAROUS RELIC

So there are initial reports that China has had the three Filipino ‘drug mules’ executed.

Capital punishment is a ‘barbarous relic,’ to use the Keynesian phrase. And for all the economic progress China, Singapore and other countries have attained over the last few decades, what is missing is an explicit understanding of liberty and property rights that would otherwise dispel the supposed necessity of murder or vengeance in human affairs.

I recently wrote on how even coerced limitation of convicts’ mobility, i.e. imprisonment, is contrary to free society. Executions are several steps further back. Acts of physical violence are only justified in self-defense, and imprisonment and the death penalty are not self-defense.

To compound the tragedy of the executed Filipinos’ situation, their alleged criminal offense, of transporting drugs, should not even be a crime, with no victims involved.

To say that drugs, in themselves, ruin the youth and make degenerates of them, is like saying that fire, in itself, is detrimental to humanity because it burns people’s houses. It’s like saying greed caused the 2008 financial crisis, rather than explaining whose greed (bureaucrats and their cronies in Wall Street).

Society, whether in China or in the Philippines, has a long way to go to be properly called ‘civilization,’ that is, a system of property rights and free association. As long as coercive government remains a means to man’s ends, “the name of ‘man’ he has yet to earn.”