Among the powers of government is meting out punishment, and writers such as Montesquieu, Cesare Beccaria, and the American founders thought afresh about the government’s license to harm its citizens.17 Criminal punishment, they argued, is not a mandate to implement cosmic justice but part of an incentive structure that discourages antisocial acts without causing more suffering than it deters. The reason the punishment should fit the crime, for example, is not to balance some mystical scale of justice but to ensure that a wrongdoer stops at a minor crime rather than escalating to a more
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