Yikes!

65% of Canadians support the return of the death penalty:

 Andrew Barr/National Post

Let's be clear: instituting the death penalty means legitimizing the government's power to pre-meditatively kill its own citizens. Unless people truly feel that the government is unerring (which, judging by this list of the posthumously pardoned, is absurd), I think supporting the death penalty indicates a failure of imagination.

That is, 65% of Canadians imagine themselves only as the judge, never the accused.  

A quick thought

A friend of mine shared the following quote from economist Robert Higgs. It's a stunning reminder of what people are apt to accept when violence is instigated from behind a desk:

Anarchists did not try to carry out genocide against the Armenians in Turkey; they did not deliberately starve millions of Ukrainians; they did not create a system of death camps to kill Jews, gypsies, and Slavs in Europe; they did not fire-bomb scores of large German and Japanese cities and drop nuclear bombs on two of them; they did not carry out a Great Leap Forward that killed scores of millions of Chinese; they did not attempt to kill everybody with any appreciable education in Cambodia; they did not launch one aggressive war after another; they did not implement trade sanctions that killed perhaps 500,000 Iraqi children. In debates between anarchists and statists, the burden of proof clearly should rest on those who place their trust in the state. Anarchy's mayhem is wholly conjectural; the state's mayhem is undeniably, factually horrendous.