What is punishment?

I find that any idiot can understand punishment, but adults make it more complex than it is. Punishment is a taking, a restriction placed against an individual of those things which are his. The argument is not about this, but about those things that belong to a man, and the complexities adults who play at law bring to the picture.

To approach punishment, we must go back to the cases, and laws, where it was discussed. The primary of these was Cummings V. Missouri.

The Attorney General for the State of Missouri argued that punishment was only those things that were absolutely one's own, These things were life, liberty, and property, and in the nature of punishment, one could not be punished by taking that which was not his own. The farmer, recovering his cow from someone to whom he had loaned it, did no punishment. There was no punishment in retrieving stolen goods from a thief. He argued that a man did not own the right to have a job, nor anything else.

The supreme court wisely, and properly rejected this statement. According to the court in the past, our rights are not limited merely to those set down in that Constitutional bill of rights, but are a whole, indivisible, delivered via blood and toil of our worthy ancestors. They, Too, are a property.

We have a property in our own lives, a property most dear, and precious, for without that life we may enjoy no other property. We have a property in our liberty, for without that liberty, the enjoyment of our life is limited and restrained to that of the basest serf in a feudal land. We have a right within our property, as well, for without the right to property, we cannot have the property inherent in the other two rights. The fourth right is equally important, the right to defend life, liberty, and property against all takers.

But we also have a right to sue, in court of law, against all takers of our intangible property, and if necessary, to defend them. If a man attempts to restrain us against our will, it is an assault and battery. If a man stirs up a majority, and passes legislation to do the same, it is no less an assault and battery upon the individual thus restrained.

The court has repeatedly found that limiting the idea of punishment to that which seizes life, liberty and property only is false. Lesser assaults, bills of pains and penalties, are also attainder. Some of those bills and laws, refer to past acts in their establishment, and are no less attainder.

Punishment is any thing that sets the individual at a separate burden of law. While in the prison, for the protection of prisoners and others, you are restrained in the exercise of your rights for the time of the sentence. This, and the isolation from the society that you have wronged, is part of the punishment. Punishment as well as being retributive may be preventative, in order to bring about a desired prevention of the repeat of the act. It may be a separation from society, a mark placed upon the individual to forever set them apart from civilization.

Attaint, attinctus, blackened, or stained... no longer fit for society, set apart by the mark, society feels no further obligation to the individuals thus attained, save to see them executed.

Punishment is not a power of legislature. It can set guidelines, it is the judge, and jury that determine the nature of punishment, even to the point of defying the judge, and legislature themselves.

The court is not, and has never been, bound to accept the excuses the legislature gives for restriction. A setting of separate burdens of law, creation of crimes that for no other class of citizen is crime, an establishment of laws restricting where one may work, live, educate one's self, and how and where one must believe, all are punishment. They are taking rights which are irrevocably the individual's.

Restrictions upon the use of private property are also punishment. It is not a crime to use the property as one sees fit, so long as there is no danger to human life or the neighbor's property. There is no right to restrict one's neighbor's property to retain your own property value. If one chooses to destroy the value of their own property, that is their choice.

There is a right in our own sovereignty, a right to our own self-willed choosing of the future, a right that is, indeed, even the foundation of our right to life, liberty, and property. (Chisholm v. Georgia).

We have the right to have, and maintain, the best, and most-limited government for the purpose of maintaining those rights, and to alter or abolish those governments if they go out of bounds.

We have no right to try to restrict the rights of others, for any reason, by our own hands, or the hands of the government. It is no less punishment, and in many ways a far more insidious and damaging one, to use the force of government to steal that which you wish, than to use your own hands to murder, to pillage, or to enslave.

One might ask themselves... if I allow the removal of rights for those I do not like... how many do not like me? How many may be brought, by lies, or by confusion, by malice or fraud, to dislike me?

It is that security in rights that is part of the general welfare, and the purpose of government itself. We punish for violations of those rights of life, liberty, property, and the myriad other rights which are also property. The right to have an opinion is equally a property as your home, your land, and your body. The right to speak that opinion without reserve, is equally a right, not to be subject to a man's offense, but only for those things spoken and written to be knowingly, maliciously and damagingly untrue.

We have a right to self-defense, a right to worship, to believe, to walk down the street and breathe clean air. So long as you leave every other person the same right, it is a right. One does not have a right to pollute public lands, for the enjoyment of those lands, pristine, is a right. One does not have a right to kill others, except in self-defense, for the enjoyment of that life is also a right.

Punishment, therefore, cannot be simply those things that restrict life, liberty, and property, but those things that restrict, and damage those things which make the life, liberty, and property worth exercising dominion and control over. The properties of one's labor, the properties inherent in one's ideas and consciousness, the properties inherent in that very essence of the pursuit of happiness.

We do not have the right to have happiness delivered to us... we only have the right to pursuit, capturing it is up to us.

The congress has no rights, only powers, and none of those powers allow them to determine those upon whom the law is to land, but only general legislation is allowed. (U.S. v Brown.)

I may indeed be a total idiot... but at least I admit it. I still see these things clearly. I may not be an idiot in the nature of language and thought, but I approach things from ignorance and logic.

I sometimes wish, that there were more idiots out there that would.

It may have a salutory effect upon understanding to read the words of Chisholm v. Georgia, , Cummings V. Missouri, Ex Parte Garland, Aptheker v Secretary of State, and U.S. v Brown.