Exod.20
And God spake all these words, saying,
I am the LORD thy God,…Thou shalt have no other gods before me… Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them:
Ya gotta dance with the One what brung ya.
Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain;
Don’t cuss.
Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy…Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates:
Thank your Mom for cooking the pot roast and taters.
Honour thy father and thy mother:
Don’t sass your folks.
Thou shalt not kill.
Keep your hands to yourself.
Thou shalt not commit adultery….Thou shalt not steal…/ ..Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s.
If it ain’t yours, leave it alone.
Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.
Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive — so don’t start.

And one other, which seems to be more of a Mom than a Dad thing, but would make life on earth much more pleasant for everyone. Maybe it was on the first set that Moses broke:
If you mess it up, clean it up.

“Thus we should not be … (with a few important exceptions) liars–deceivers, defrauders ….”

–Insofar as “it” is nailable at all. :>(

. . . . .

The fundamental moral point of Objectivism is that people should take responsibility for themselves, and that no one has the right to co-opt (attempt to nullify) another person’s right of self-determination.

In this sense, everyone has a right to life — but only to his own life, his own body and time and thought and effort, not to anyone else’s.

Thus we should not be moochers (parasites on others) nor cheats nor (with a few important exceptions) nor extortionists nor murderers …

Nor appeasers, except when that’s the only way to “live on to fight another day.”

Isn’t it funny how many of us here probably basically agree with that principle.

Isn’t it funny how stable and socially comfortable a society can be when those are the general standards.

Atlas Shrugged is specifically about the difference in attitude and behavior between those who follow the moral principle and those who don’t.

It is also about the social havoc wreaked when the misbehaviors are generally tolerated … let alone encouraged.

Note also this, which is integral with the foregoing:

Objectivism holds that of all Man’s tools for survival, Reason is the foremost. This means Reason in the full sense, the exercise of careful observation of How Things Are, thoughtful consideration of observations (experience) for their content, the function of the parts of the observation and their results, and the application of logic to figure out what one should do to achieve what one wants. So, Miss Rand wrote that “Reason is Man’s tool for survival,” and that to subvert a man’s mind is the worst evil.

(Which of course was the point of Big Brother’s methods.)

.

It’s one thing to have an ideal; another to realize it. But we ought not therefore to reject the ideal qua an ideal. We ought rather to continue to examine the ideal for flaws it may have in itself, and also to recognize that we have to acknowledge that things are as they are and that each of us is going to have to balance priorities.

Miss Rand pointed out that while it is morally wrong of a starving man to steal a tomato from somebody’s garden, it is understandable and forgivable if, the next morning, the thief confesses to the gardener, asks what he can do to make up for his wrongdoing, and, assuming the victim of the theft comes up with a reasonable request for retribution, complies with it.

. .

Prof. Richard Epstein (whom Art Deco mentions above) more or less began as a libertarian, but over the years he’s become more of a Classical Liberal and less of a notional libertarian. He mostly grounds his arguments on the effects (especially but far from wholly the economic effects) on Society of various policies. (He seems to be viscerally anti-Rand.) He thus puts himself on the utilitarian side of the spectrum, but not very far that way.

He thinks that it is better for private action to achieve this or presumably-desirable goal than for government to attempt it, where this is possible.

He believes in voluntary cooperation, but he accepts far more than I do the necessity in a variety of situations for forced cooperation. Pity.

Nevertheless, his rule-of-thumb for how people should conduct themselves is,

Keep your hands to yourself.

Meaning, don’t go getting what you want from other people by force. You are not entitled to hurt their bodies nor to take their property without their willing, uncoerced permission. Honor a person’s person and his property.

. . .

Personally, I sum it up thus: No one has the Great-Frog-Given right to co-opt another person’s right of self-determination. Only by a person’s attempt to do so first, is another justified in limiting that agressor’s right of self-determination.

That, in a nutshell, is what’s wrong with slavery.

(And, YES, what we do does affect others. That’s the problem of “externalities,” and solving it via some compromise that is reasonably acceptable in moral principle and also to the members of a society … is the Great Worm in the Woodpile. In fact, both Prof. Epstein and, I think, libertarian Prof. Randy Barnett are chiefly interested in trying to resolve various instances of these problems.)

…
I proofread as best I can, but Edit visits me only very, very rarely. Apologies in advance.

“. . . two-thirds of crimes that are solved are solved because the victim actually knows the defendant or because the defendant is picked up . . .”

There are enough cases of wrongful conviction, even though they are rare compared to the volume of rightful ones, to raise qualms in the minds of most people about implementing your regime.

I’m not endorsing this, but here is the cops’ perspective (utter hearsay, but believable) as told to me years ago by a cop: “Yeah, every once in a while we get the wrong guy, but these are all bad guys, so we’re getting him for the ones he committed that we missed.”

Since studies have shown that criminals commit around 12 felonies for every one they get caught for, I can understand the cops’ point of view.

There’s a Baskin & Robbins selection of libertarianisms. ‘Old whigs’ like Hayek and Gottfried Dietze are fairly atypical, because the social vision of old whigs assumes people living adult lives in nuclear families, and the arrested development cases at CATO and the Reason Foundation cannot process that. Contemporary policy libertarians are conventional academics, other-directed and quite concerned with the faculty rathskellar consensus. Compare Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell, and Richard Epstein with the capon cotillion over at the Mercatus Center. Then there’s the crew over at the von Mises Institute, where promoting the autonomy of little platoons tends to get lost while they’re promoting goldbuggery and neo-confederate historiography. Did I mention what’s left of Objectivism?

Why?

As to the first point, a young man we knew, who was raised to think the world owed him everything without effort, had to get money for some reason (probably to pay off loan sharks, but I don’t remember), got a handgun somehow, put on a ski mask, and — held up the clerks at the fast-food joint where his sister worked.
The police picked him up pretty fast, he pled to something, served his time, and (fortunately) turned his life around.

Your Draconian rules would also turn things around societally very quickly, but the kicker is that we know there are plenty of police and prosecutors and judges willing to put away an innocent person just as readily as they would a guilty one (sometimes more so when they are corrupt in addition to being biased and/or stupid) — their standards of satisfaction are sometimes demonstrably low.
There are enough cases of wrongful conviction, even though they are rare compared to the volume of rightful ones, to raise qualms in the minds of most people about implementing your regime. Sadly, any safeguards against abuse of its strictures would probably go missing just as rapidly as have our safeguards against government malfeasance

Raising the bar to “beyond all shadow of doubt” is a wise idea for capital crimes, as is reducing the number thereof (as we have noticeably done since the 19th century). I have no problem with prisoners living to the norm of our troops in the field, and working at healthy outdoor occupations (such as our parents and grandparents did just to survive), with suitable safeguards against actual harm, which abusive maltreatment was justly complained of in the past.

The maddening contradictions in our “legal” system (not “justice” system, as someone here noted on another thread) cause us to make both type I and type II errors: treating actual vicious repeat criminals with far too much leniency, and innocents or grossly overcharged persons with too much harshness.

And then there is that little matter of vehemently prosecuting / persecuting people on the wrong side of the political line while letting those on your own side skate….