Support for the death penalty may be dropping across the board, but the policy still enjoys substantially stronger support from conservatives than from liberals. On the surface, this makes sense. The death penalty saves money and promotes law and order — right? I would argue that a closer look at the facts reveals that the practice actually runs contrary to most traditional conservative principles.
Conservatives believe in limiting the government’s interference in the lives of private citizens as much as possible. This principle is rooted in the very rational belief that the government is not a reliable institution. You don’t have to be a conservative to acknowledge that a huge, churning bureaucracy like the United States government is going to make mistakes pretty frequently. Here is a very incomplete list of things that I — a bleedin’ heart liberal snowflake, in the interests of full disclosure — do not trust the government to do correctly:
1. Collect garbage. The government does a bad job. There’s no reason why Trash Day should always end with stray bits of garbage scattered across the street.
2. Create a website. Have you ever seen a government website that didn’t look like it was made by programmer who just discovered blogging in the 1990s?
3. Kill its citizens.
