Free Markets, Clear Skies, Nervous Sheep
By Give Redbeard a read this morning. Here’s an excerpt:
Say you’re Marty Miller and you strangled your wife. Now, that’s murder, and you’ve made the muder rate go up in Lawrence, Kansas. Now say you’re Bruce Charles Englar in York, Pennsylvania, and you’ve made the raping sheep rate increase in York. Under current laws, both men will serve their sentences individually for their individual crimes–of course, under the premise of my argument you’d serve both sentences in Pennsylvania and Kansas. But my proposal, unlike most past regulatory efforts, doesn’t tell criminals how to reduce crime. Instead, it caps crime rates and allows criminals to decide how to meet those limits. Since Marty Miller has exceed the regulatory levels for murder, he can buy ‘murder credits’ from Bruce Charles Englar, who has not exceeded the murder levels. And Englar can buy ‘raping sheep credits’ from Miller. Both sentences are reduced, thereby reducing the public’s growing financial burden of imprisoning murderers and sheep rapists. Society benefits and so do criminals because they can decide their crimes in their interest with the benefit of market forces.