It came to me today as I was noodling around the Internet. The gold standard for criminal justice is execution. What do I mean by that? Our money used to be backed by gold. It was impossible for the value to become wildly inflated because the amount of gold backing the money was stable. The dollar kept its value, and people trusted its worth. Then we were taken off the gold standard. What happened? The value of the dollar began to shrink. It was no longer founded on anything real, and therefore could change in extreme ways. People lost faith in the value of the dollar. They stopped saving their money, and went into debt. There was no incentive to save. Apply that to the criminal justice system. The justice system is based, at the most basic level, on the biblical truism "An eye for an eye." This means that the punishment should be proportional to the crime. In Muslim countries this is taken literally. Thieves have their hand cut off. Throughout our history, the punishment for murder has been execution. It's the bedrock of criminal justice, the foundation upon which the rest is built. An eye for an eye, a life for a life. But this has largely been taken away from us. The consequence? Nobody believes in the criminal justice system. Nobody really believes justice is being administered, because judges can choose to give whatever sentence strikes their fancy, depending on the sex or race of the criminal. Plea bargaining further eroded public trust in the system. Eliminating execution from criminal justice has had an effect analogous to eliminating the gold standard from our monetary system. Trust is gone. The system no longer has the foundation "An eye for an eye," and without that, there is no real concept of justice. Justice is different from deterrent, or punishment. Justice comes from God. Justice has a rightness to the feel of it -- we all know it when we feel it. But liberals have taken that from us. There is no justice in the justice system.