I mean, pretty much any treatment you give to someone as mentally ill as Nikolas Cruz or Darrell Brooks is going to be without their "full informed consent." Some types of people inherently lack the capacity to give meaningful consent-- which is more than a little disturbing for anyone who wants to construct a liberal/libertarian theory of social betterment.
Of course, I'm overall on your side. The idea that the mentally ill are somehow "better off" without treatment is itself a pretty sick notion, and it has led many Californian leftists to act as though deranged homeless people are somehow "more free" in their "natural state" than if they were getting treatment in an asylum. The deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill has been an unmitigated disaster for my state. But I really had to struggle to come to terms with this, and I feel that if I can endorse government-sponsored brain-tinkering in any circumstance, then I really can't justify being against the death penalty from a purely moral perspective (ignoring the collateral damage it causes to innocent people). For many years, I was of the belief that forcibly treating the mentally ill was too extreme a violation of liberty to be tolerated. The reality of the streets of San Francisco sadly changed my mind.
I mean, ultimately, I guess I'm not
absolutely against the idea of the state taking a life either. I mean, we all pretty much agree that it's okay for law enforcement to kill someone if they're about to kill someone else. That's not the same as the death penalty, of course, but it shows that any principle, even one held in very high regard, will necessarily have its caveats. I think we've discussed this before, but I don't believe there really is such a thing as an "absolute right". There are many different rights that we might want to guarantee, but those always come into conflict sooner or later, and you have to choose which one to forfeit based on the specifics of the situation.
I mean, at this point you might as well spend as much of Elon's money as you can before you start doing actual harm with your policies. Why not just tax the rich to pay for meaningless BS office jobs where employees sit around and play with Microsoft Excel and email all day long? (I mean, even more so than what we already do.) What a great welfare program that would be!
You're phrasing this as a
reductio ad absurdum but I unironically believe this would be preferable to the alternative of not taxing Elon Musk, in every conceivable way. Of course, there are
even better ways for the state to use that money, but that's not the point here.
Even if you don't care about "deservingness" from Elon's standpoint, you should care about it from the government's point of view. Why does the state deserve to spend that money? Why does it need to happen? If there isn't a good answer, then it should be pretty uncontroversial to not bother raising that revenue to begin with. And for the record, I'm confident we can both think of plenty of good things to spend Elon's money on besides the dumbass bird website. I just think therapy for Cruz or Dahmer is a big time waster for everyone involved. Maybe it could be justified from the standpoint of psychological research, though.
I've already explained what I think the benefit is to spending money for that purpose (and keep in mind here, we're talking about a minuscule amount of money relative to a state's budget, or even relative to Elon Musk's wealth for that matter). Obviously "deservingness" is not a category you can apply to a state (I don't even believe it's a useful category to apply to individuals except in very specific situations!). The point is that the state can put that money to what I consider to be at least somewhat good use, whereas in Elon Musk's hands (or any billionaire's, to be clear - I'm not talking about his personal failings but about the structural social effect of having billionaires around) it is actually harmful.
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