Sunday, May 16, 2010

Three strikes and you're out

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Living in NZ at the moment leads me to the question of which party to vote for..... vote...if I believed in the concept. Anyway looking at the parties on offer - The Labor Party (socialists-collectivists), the National Party (i.e. Conservatives-collectivists), the ACT Party (Libertarian Party, slightly collectivist), I am compelled to argue that the ACT Party provides the greatest promise in two respects:
1. It has the best intellectual base, best policies
2. It has the 2nd best leader - the current PM does present better
3. It has the potential to control the balance of power in parliament - not a fair place to come from, but a good basis to make change. i.e. If you believe in representative democracy, how could a minority party holding the balance of power serve representation. It doesn't. But then representative democracy is a sham. Consensus based democracy gets full marks.

This brings us to the ACT Party's policy on 'Three Strikes' - a popular conception from Conservatives. I am not a big fan of the policy, though it has merits if one recognises the following. This is an excerpt of my posting on their website:

The appeal of this policy is that it embraces the dictum that 'there ought to be consequences for actions'. It fails though in several respects:
  1. The same does not hold for parents, so children not raised by healthy values really get very little empathy. i.e. The context is dropped. Sadly as a society we only have an interest in people when they commit a crime. This is way too late, so there really needs to be done more through the education system and parenting education to resolve early childhood issues.
  2. 'Three strikes' does not really convey any education or values
  3. Society does not possess much in the way of integrity, so its inevitable that people screw up.
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Author
Andrew Sheldon

ConvinceMe.Net - Anyone up for a debate?