Good essay. A similar issue I have encountered: Americans who want to ban guns, or at least regulate them very strictly, but also oppose the existence of prisons and law enforcement. They haven't thought their ideas through even a little.
I agree with the vast majority of this. Obviously, enforcement mechanisms are critical to prevent defection, and it's in precisely those areas where enforcement is least comfortable for the enforcers that it's most critical.
But I have to take strong exception to Yglesias' position on the traffic issue. My rule in this regard is simple: stop snitching. Just fucking stop. Refrain from involving the state in a dispute wherever possible. Just because you have the right to do a thing does not mean it's the right thing to do.
If you want to be a busybody and annoy your (upper middle-class) neighbors, such as Yglesias has, go ahead. Leave notes under their windshields if you really want. You can even threaten to report them. Maybe (MAYBE) report them after you've given them fair notice that you're about and causing problems.
I accept that people with fake, expired, or obscured vehicle tags will be more likely to cause accidents and drive too fast and so on. But again, the people who Yglesias is playing freelance police on are rich DCers, who almost certainly cause traffic accidents at below the per capita rate. Me personally, I'm a wealthy lawyer, and I regularly disregard traffic rules I don't like or that are inconvenient. When traffic is light enough, I rarely drive slower than 80 mph. I roll through red lights and stop signs at empty intersections. Never caused a single accident, because I actually know how to drive safely.
If you wanted to target drivers who are likely to cause actual physical harm in traffic, you'll need to do it in a different part of DC. The people Matt is snitching will tend to be people who already pay a tremendous amount of money in taxes and fees to the government, and who are law-abiding in every respect that normal people recognize as important.
Fund the murder police. Defund the traffic police. Defund the IRS.
If I could press a button to make you pay a hefty fine whenever you ran a red, I would press it every time. Even better if your license was suspended after three pushes.
Everyone is sure they're a safe driver; the person who rolls through a red thinking "this could very well cause an accident" doesn't exist. No one has caused an accident until they cause an accident. The idea that rich drivers who drive 80 and run reds are safer drivers than poor drivers who drive 80 and run reds is absurd. In fact, you already granted that people with fake tags are more likely to cause accidents, so essentially you're saying "let's wait until it's actually vehicular manslaughter before treating it as a problem."
I'm sure you would, you nosy little freak. You just adore the idea of imposing yourself on others, don't you? You sicken me. Never heard of things like due process, proof beyond a reasonable doubt, civil liberties, trial by jury, the right to counsel? All the things that make us civilized? These are all disposable as long as you can feel good about yourself and know you made someone else miserable.
You are literally what is wrong with our society. Nothing going for you in life? Better spread it around! Got nothing better to do? Snitch! Oh no, people are making decisions and thinking for themselves without reference to the letter of the law in every situation?! GET OUT THE BUTTON, SUSAN! WE'VE GOT A CRUSADE! DEUS VULT! Mind your own fucking business.
As to your other point, you're wrong. It's transparently the case that the rich, in general, are more ethical, more responsible, more conscientious, more-law abiding, and generally morally superior to the poor. That's why they're rich. Of course, there will be numerous exceptions in both directions, but that does not change the general fact. (tendency, trend, whatever). When rich people commit crimes, they steal people's money. When the poor commit crimes, people die. I know which one I prefer.
As to your last sentence, my point was quite the opposite: focus traffic enforcement on those who are actually likely to cause injury in traffic.
I'll disregard your first two paragraphs, and focus on the rest, where the substance is.
It probably is true that the rich in general are more law-abiding than the poor. But we're not talking about the population of the rich in general, but that portion that is already breaking the law, whether by running reds like you do or using fake tags like the luxury cars Yglesias is reporting. Within that population, I don't know what your basis is for saying that a rich speeder is better than a poor speeder, or that rich speeders cause less damage than poor ones. Running a red light is about personal safety, not embezzlement or whatever, no matter the income of the perpetrator.
No, please focus on those first two paragraphs. They are the CORE of this issue. People who react like you do to someone saying they violate traffic laws when it's safe to do so are part of the problem. When your first reaction to an anecdote like that is to reach for some kind of magic retribute-o-matic you know you maybe aren't one of the good guys. That is to say, it seems to me that you've outed yourself as a fundamentally illiberal person. I admit I was mad when I wrote that, but I think it's accurate. Feel free to rebut.
People like me, who say, "eh it's someone else's problem," are part of the solution (or at least aren't making it worse).
Otherwise, I don't actually disagree that rich people who are already breaking the law in the manner described are more likely than other rich people to cause physical harm in traffic. Think of it like this: in Yglesias' 'stack from this morning (for example), about depressive behaviors among young people, he notes that boys in general are less depressed than girls, but liberal boys are more depressed than conservative girls.
Similarly, in this case, I'd say that a rich person (who we'll agree is breaking the law related to their tags) is more likely to cause physical injury in traffic than a 100% law-abiding rich person. But I still think that the tag-violator rich person is less likely to cause physical injury in traffic than a 100% law-abiding poor person, in general. Again, numerous exceptions etc. etc.
In a world of limited resources, it's important to focus where you'll do the most good. Yglesias, in my view then, is inflicting needless contact with an aggressive and violent state on fundamentally law-abiding neighbors. The only result is that Matt feels good about himself, and his neighbor is miserable for a few days. I just don't think that's behavior we should be encouraging.
Okay, here's my rebuttal to those first couple paragraphs:
—The button is a thought experiment, a contrivance: you've admitted that you run the red lights, and I would like it if every time you do, you receive a stiff punishment. I would not be in favor of button-based justice, because as you say we need due process to ensure that the state's punitive power is not abused. But my preference would be that every time you break this particular law, you would be duly punished for it, because the potential consequences if you miscalculate are horrific and because, even if you could be absolutely certain that you would never cause an accident by running a red (which you can't), your doing so and getting away with it encourages other drivers to do so as well, drivers who may not be as infallible as you. If that still strikes you as illiberal, maybe you could explain to me how; that would seem tantamount to arguing that the laws themselves are illiberal.
—You told me to mind my own business. My tax dollars pay for the law to be enforced; if something is not my business, then it shouldn't be a matter of law. That's why the answer to laws against sodomy, adultery, and contraception wasn't "let's just not enforce them" but "let's repeal the law." As long as the law is on the books, I'm free to make it my business if I feel doing so is in my community's interests. You can feel I'm wrong about that, but "stop snitching, you nosy freak" is not an argument for why.
—I would not report a crime that I did not believe caused me or anyone else any harm (I obviously wouldn't report someone for sodomy back when that was a crime, e.g., and someone who did so would be wrong, because they would be wrong in the belief that the law was a good one.). That doesn't describe traffic laws. Road safety is not "someone else's problem" as you say; it's my problem, as I use the roads, with my kids, as both a pedestrian and a motorist. It's genuinely weird to me that you concede the ground that someone with fake tags is more likely to injure or kill someone, but then continue to maintain that this isn't a problem that affects me.
The next two points relate to your last comment:
—On what basis do you say that a tag-violating rich person is less likely to cause physical injury than a poor person who isn't even speeding or breaking any other traffic laws? This seems absurdly implausible to me and you don't provide any evidence for it.
—Finally, you rely on the supposed inferiority of poor people to argue that they should be subject to more law enforcement. However, when you invoke the harms of "needless contact with an aggressive and violent state," you ignore that poor people are much more likely to feel that aggression and violence. The people Matt reports get a ticket in the mail, not a visit from a SWAT team. It's a kind of "stolen valor" to pity the rich person who has to feel the brunt of state aggression, when in practice such a person will be perfectly fine, if annoyed to be caught.
If the button is a thought experiment, your thought is entirely disordered. If that thought got beyond an idle revenge fantasy (we all have those, and they're fair enough) and far enough to write up as a comment, I don't trust you and I won't. You just strike me so strongly as a person who would have been a loyalist in the American Revolution, and to this day your descendants would be appending "United Empire Loyalist" to their signatures.
Yes, the laws are illiberal. I am more than happy to make that argument. You might not have picked up on this yet, but I'm pretty damn libertarian. A huge portion of our law is not merely illiberal, it is unconstitutional and morally repugnant. The idea that the state should legislate in even a quarter of the areas it has totalized should sicken free people.
But my point about traffic was not a generalizable point, as I'll admit. I'm purely making a point about myself. I know it's impossible to make law on that scale, which is fine. That's where civil disobedience comes in. To be clear, I don't think that traffic laws are necessarily an area where the law is fundamentally illiberal. But I think, as an example, the traffic law should be reformed focus on driving safely. If you can do that without obeying pointless red lights and stop signs at empty intersections, I say go for it.
This is already the law in a lot of cases, but never in favor of the driver, always in favor of the state. A police officer can decide you're driving in an unsafe manner even if you're obeying the letter of the law and cite you, and then you can go to trial if you want, but you'll lose. On the other hand, if you're going 75 MPH in a 65 MPH zone but the only two cars in five miles are you and the cop, that's a ticket.
"As long as the law is on the books, I'm free to make it my business..." FUCKING NO YOU'RE NOT. Oh my jesus fucking christ. Just because you have a right to do a thing DOES NOT MAKE DOING THAT THING RIGHT. Do you see how much all your thoughts disgust me? Maybe I'm an exceptional person in this regard, but holy crap. Think for two seconds before you slam out more pro-state garbage. The state has guns and nukes and capitol buildings! It doesn't need you tonguing its ass! Just stop!
"I would not report a crime..." But as you just said, everyone is free to make these things their business as long as they're on the books. In a sense, this is literally true, which does indeed call for a massive reform, even revolution, in the statutory law of our country. I'd rather have the discretion here committed to the person just trying to go about their life, not the busybody who wants to punish them. You recognize the perversity of this when it comes to sodomy. But what we have in this country is the opposite, as your other thoughts continually demonstrate.
Regardless, I agree that "road safety" is your business; traffic deaths are a serious problem. I just don't think that those concerns are sufficiently correlated with "has expired tags" (or the like) to make snitching morally defensible.
"On what basis..." You already agreed the rich are probably more law abiding than the poor. That's the basis. I'm sorry I'm not going to hunt up a bunch of stats or journal articles for this comment argument, but I'm not. I simply don't think, and you probably won't convince me, that de minimis law breaking, such as over tags, is indicative of significantly increased danger, in general, whether among the rich or the poor.
"The supposed inferiority..." Not their supposed inferiority. The documented fact that they commit more crimes, and many more violent crimes. I know it's very fashionable to be blind to this obvious reality, but I'm not and I won't be. Otherwise, I strongly object to your "stolen valor" analogy on its own terms. Stolen valor laws are unconstitutional.
That's not the point though. I don't pity the rich person. I don't pity anyone. I'm not a person who has pity in him (you may have noticed). My point was that it is counterproductive and illiberal. The violence and aggression of the state has to do with the illiberality of snitching, not necessarily with the likelihood that serious harm will be inflicted.
I feel it's worth noting that Matt is not enforcing (used very loosely, he is actually using a city app to alert parking enforcement so they can come check and see if a rule is being broken) tag rules for the sake of things. DC has a large number of automatic enforcement tools designed to stop people from driving at unsafe speeds in dense urban areas and school zones. Many people, a large number of which are wealthy, attempt to avoid this system by using clever tricks to deface their licence plate so the camera cannot see it. Increasingly, people purchase fake tags or register their cars in jurisdictions that do not have reciprocity of enforcement to further this goal. While most people are just trying to get out of small tickets for dangerous driving, some do this so they can commit more serious crimes. From drive-bys to a growing trend of selling stolen cars with fake plates for cash to people who really need a car, all sorts of much more serious criminal activity is facilitated by allowing lots of cars to break the "have a registered car with valid licence plates on it" rule.
I used to work in law enforcement in the bay area and a ton of people abused the old paper dealer cover plate system in CA or would do the same defacing tricks to get out of paying bridge tolls. It just so happened that doing this made your car much harder to catch with warrant-checking ALPR cameras on police cars and, as police chases became more curtailed, meant that robbery crews could escape police stops without a way to find them again (unless they had the misfortune of being stopped by the CHP, who happily chase cars). The fact that I could walk down any given street in Oakland, Berkeley or Richmond and find 1-2 cars violating the licence plate law meant that you could easily hide a more serious criminal intent in a sea of bridge toll cheats and a few people who genuinely couldn't afford their registration or forgot to put their new plates on.
I understand it is your view that licence plate rules are a "gotcha" crime and nobody should help the government enforce them, but as someone who always paid the $7 to cross the Bay Bridge, always pays his $300 registration fee and generally would not like to be run over by someone blowing a red light at dangerous speeds in dense urban areas, I am happy to see these rules be enforced.
You agree with the vast majority of this? But your comment is the complete opposite.
Your general position is 'laws should apply to people other than me, because I'm naturally law abiding'. Although maybe even more generally 'laws should only apply to poor people, because poor people (whatever that means - is eg the unemployed income poor child of a billionaire a safe, ethical driver?) are unethical and just generally bad at constantly weighing risk and assessing expected value in real time (e.g. I can reasonably run this red light because I will kill/maim fewer than X people and that's an acceptable cost/convenience ratio for me and let's ignore externalities because they have 0 value (they don't - the article is effectively about that exact point)).
So you are effectively fundamentally disagreeing with the premise of this article.
PS your theory is falsifiable - if that was really necessary - so you should be able to find any number of empirical studies to support/refute your claims.
I recall in William Stuntz' "The Collapse of American Criminal Justice" he discusses how during prohibition upperclass gentleman's clubs (not the kind of clubs referred to as such nowadays) were able to evade law enforcement better than lowerclass bars, and says there could have been a real argument that because less other crime resulted from the former than the latter this was not such a problem... but that such tensions helped to undo "America's good culture war".
Ok. Well my reading of that article is that they just didn't try to enforce laws in 'upper class pubs' , and, unsurprisingly, it led to "which Stuntz acknowledges may be more socially desirable if not for the reduced respect it led for the law". I.e there are unpleasant externalities - like completely undermining respect for the law - associated with arbitrary enforcement of laws which potentially completely undermines the 'ad hoc' approach.
Such an approach is simply not compatible with a legal system that is proportionate and creates, at least, a perception of equality. You appear to want a legal system that is based on real time, cost benefit analysis. For a variety of reasons in addition to the one just raised (such as lack of enforcement technology, it's fundamentally backwards looking) which, Id argue is completely incompatible with a relatively free and stable societal equilibrium. Maybe you care less about such an end state goal? (I'd be interested to know what you, as a lawyer, actually think the point of a legal system is?). You're basically describing the legal system in Russia or Zimbabwe or China or anywhere in the western world 100, 200, 300 ... years ago where, very often, rich and/or influential people openly flouted or manipulated or wrote the law to meet their needs (in modern western countries rich people just outspend everyone else).
You are confusing me with someone else. I'm a programmer, not a lawyer, and when I brought up Stuntz it wasn't to advocate a policy but instead to give that as an example of a justification for such a policy.
The state owns the roads, issues the license plates, and the tickets. Getting the state out of this issue would require removing their responsibility for the roads.
This distinction can be important occasionally, eg when people try to cause outrage by saying that 'cis-women are being barred from women's Olympic events for having high testosterone levels', they are actually talking about people with intersex conditions who were raised as girls but have testes and normal male testosterone levels.
Good essay. A similar issue I have encountered: Americans who want to ban guns, or at least regulate them very strictly, but also oppose the existence of prisons and law enforcement. They haven't thought their ideas through even a little.
I agree with the vast majority of this. Obviously, enforcement mechanisms are critical to prevent defection, and it's in precisely those areas where enforcement is least comfortable for the enforcers that it's most critical.
But I have to take strong exception to Yglesias' position on the traffic issue. My rule in this regard is simple: stop snitching. Just fucking stop. Refrain from involving the state in a dispute wherever possible. Just because you have the right to do a thing does not mean it's the right thing to do.
If you want to be a busybody and annoy your (upper middle-class) neighbors, such as Yglesias has, go ahead. Leave notes under their windshields if you really want. You can even threaten to report them. Maybe (MAYBE) report them after you've given them fair notice that you're about and causing problems.
I accept that people with fake, expired, or obscured vehicle tags will be more likely to cause accidents and drive too fast and so on. But again, the people who Yglesias is playing freelance police on are rich DCers, who almost certainly cause traffic accidents at below the per capita rate. Me personally, I'm a wealthy lawyer, and I regularly disregard traffic rules I don't like or that are inconvenient. When traffic is light enough, I rarely drive slower than 80 mph. I roll through red lights and stop signs at empty intersections. Never caused a single accident, because I actually know how to drive safely.
If you wanted to target drivers who are likely to cause actual physical harm in traffic, you'll need to do it in a different part of DC. The people Matt is snitching will tend to be people who already pay a tremendous amount of money in taxes and fees to the government, and who are law-abiding in every respect that normal people recognize as important.
Fund the murder police. Defund the traffic police. Defund the IRS.
If I could press a button to make you pay a hefty fine whenever you ran a red, I would press it every time. Even better if your license was suspended after three pushes.
Everyone is sure they're a safe driver; the person who rolls through a red thinking "this could very well cause an accident" doesn't exist. No one has caused an accident until they cause an accident. The idea that rich drivers who drive 80 and run reds are safer drivers than poor drivers who drive 80 and run reds is absurd. In fact, you already granted that people with fake tags are more likely to cause accidents, so essentially you're saying "let's wait until it's actually vehicular manslaughter before treating it as a problem."
I'm sure you would, you nosy little freak. You just adore the idea of imposing yourself on others, don't you? You sicken me. Never heard of things like due process, proof beyond a reasonable doubt, civil liberties, trial by jury, the right to counsel? All the things that make us civilized? These are all disposable as long as you can feel good about yourself and know you made someone else miserable.
You are literally what is wrong with our society. Nothing going for you in life? Better spread it around! Got nothing better to do? Snitch! Oh no, people are making decisions and thinking for themselves without reference to the letter of the law in every situation?! GET OUT THE BUTTON, SUSAN! WE'VE GOT A CRUSADE! DEUS VULT! Mind your own fucking business.
As to your other point, you're wrong. It's transparently the case that the rich, in general, are more ethical, more responsible, more conscientious, more-law abiding, and generally morally superior to the poor. That's why they're rich. Of course, there will be numerous exceptions in both directions, but that does not change the general fact. (tendency, trend, whatever). When rich people commit crimes, they steal people's money. When the poor commit crimes, people die. I know which one I prefer.
As to your last sentence, my point was quite the opposite: focus traffic enforcement on those who are actually likely to cause injury in traffic.
I'll disregard your first two paragraphs, and focus on the rest, where the substance is.
It probably is true that the rich in general are more law-abiding than the poor. But we're not talking about the population of the rich in general, but that portion that is already breaking the law, whether by running reds like you do or using fake tags like the luxury cars Yglesias is reporting. Within that population, I don't know what your basis is for saying that a rich speeder is better than a poor speeder, or that rich speeders cause less damage than poor ones. Running a red light is about personal safety, not embezzlement or whatever, no matter the income of the perpetrator.
No, please focus on those first two paragraphs. They are the CORE of this issue. People who react like you do to someone saying they violate traffic laws when it's safe to do so are part of the problem. When your first reaction to an anecdote like that is to reach for some kind of magic retribute-o-matic you know you maybe aren't one of the good guys. That is to say, it seems to me that you've outed yourself as a fundamentally illiberal person. I admit I was mad when I wrote that, but I think it's accurate. Feel free to rebut.
People like me, who say, "eh it's someone else's problem," are part of the solution (or at least aren't making it worse).
Otherwise, I don't actually disagree that rich people who are already breaking the law in the manner described are more likely than other rich people to cause physical harm in traffic. Think of it like this: in Yglesias' 'stack from this morning (for example), about depressive behaviors among young people, he notes that boys in general are less depressed than girls, but liberal boys are more depressed than conservative girls.
Similarly, in this case, I'd say that a rich person (who we'll agree is breaking the law related to their tags) is more likely to cause physical injury in traffic than a 100% law-abiding rich person. But I still think that the tag-violator rich person is less likely to cause physical injury in traffic than a 100% law-abiding poor person, in general. Again, numerous exceptions etc. etc.
In a world of limited resources, it's important to focus where you'll do the most good. Yglesias, in my view then, is inflicting needless contact with an aggressive and violent state on fundamentally law-abiding neighbors. The only result is that Matt feels good about himself, and his neighbor is miserable for a few days. I just don't think that's behavior we should be encouraging.
Okay, here's my rebuttal to those first couple paragraphs:
—The button is a thought experiment, a contrivance: you've admitted that you run the red lights, and I would like it if every time you do, you receive a stiff punishment. I would not be in favor of button-based justice, because as you say we need due process to ensure that the state's punitive power is not abused. But my preference would be that every time you break this particular law, you would be duly punished for it, because the potential consequences if you miscalculate are horrific and because, even if you could be absolutely certain that you would never cause an accident by running a red (which you can't), your doing so and getting away with it encourages other drivers to do so as well, drivers who may not be as infallible as you. If that still strikes you as illiberal, maybe you could explain to me how; that would seem tantamount to arguing that the laws themselves are illiberal.
—You told me to mind my own business. My tax dollars pay for the law to be enforced; if something is not my business, then it shouldn't be a matter of law. That's why the answer to laws against sodomy, adultery, and contraception wasn't "let's just not enforce them" but "let's repeal the law." As long as the law is on the books, I'm free to make it my business if I feel doing so is in my community's interests. You can feel I'm wrong about that, but "stop snitching, you nosy freak" is not an argument for why.
—I would not report a crime that I did not believe caused me or anyone else any harm (I obviously wouldn't report someone for sodomy back when that was a crime, e.g., and someone who did so would be wrong, because they would be wrong in the belief that the law was a good one.). That doesn't describe traffic laws. Road safety is not "someone else's problem" as you say; it's my problem, as I use the roads, with my kids, as both a pedestrian and a motorist. It's genuinely weird to me that you concede the ground that someone with fake tags is more likely to injure or kill someone, but then continue to maintain that this isn't a problem that affects me.
The next two points relate to your last comment:
—On what basis do you say that a tag-violating rich person is less likely to cause physical injury than a poor person who isn't even speeding or breaking any other traffic laws? This seems absurdly implausible to me and you don't provide any evidence for it.
—Finally, you rely on the supposed inferiority of poor people to argue that they should be subject to more law enforcement. However, when you invoke the harms of "needless contact with an aggressive and violent state," you ignore that poor people are much more likely to feel that aggression and violence. The people Matt reports get a ticket in the mail, not a visit from a SWAT team. It's a kind of "stolen valor" to pity the rich person who has to feel the brunt of state aggression, when in practice such a person will be perfectly fine, if annoyed to be caught.
If the button is a thought experiment, your thought is entirely disordered. If that thought got beyond an idle revenge fantasy (we all have those, and they're fair enough) and far enough to write up as a comment, I don't trust you and I won't. You just strike me so strongly as a person who would have been a loyalist in the American Revolution, and to this day your descendants would be appending "United Empire Loyalist" to their signatures.
Yes, the laws are illiberal. I am more than happy to make that argument. You might not have picked up on this yet, but I'm pretty damn libertarian. A huge portion of our law is not merely illiberal, it is unconstitutional and morally repugnant. The idea that the state should legislate in even a quarter of the areas it has totalized should sicken free people.
But my point about traffic was not a generalizable point, as I'll admit. I'm purely making a point about myself. I know it's impossible to make law on that scale, which is fine. That's where civil disobedience comes in. To be clear, I don't think that traffic laws are necessarily an area where the law is fundamentally illiberal. But I think, as an example, the traffic law should be reformed focus on driving safely. If you can do that without obeying pointless red lights and stop signs at empty intersections, I say go for it.
This is already the law in a lot of cases, but never in favor of the driver, always in favor of the state. A police officer can decide you're driving in an unsafe manner even if you're obeying the letter of the law and cite you, and then you can go to trial if you want, but you'll lose. On the other hand, if you're going 75 MPH in a 65 MPH zone but the only two cars in five miles are you and the cop, that's a ticket.
"As long as the law is on the books, I'm free to make it my business..." FUCKING NO YOU'RE NOT. Oh my jesus fucking christ. Just because you have a right to do a thing DOES NOT MAKE DOING THAT THING RIGHT. Do you see how much all your thoughts disgust me? Maybe I'm an exceptional person in this regard, but holy crap. Think for two seconds before you slam out more pro-state garbage. The state has guns and nukes and capitol buildings! It doesn't need you tonguing its ass! Just stop!
"I would not report a crime..." But as you just said, everyone is free to make these things their business as long as they're on the books. In a sense, this is literally true, which does indeed call for a massive reform, even revolution, in the statutory law of our country. I'd rather have the discretion here committed to the person just trying to go about their life, not the busybody who wants to punish them. You recognize the perversity of this when it comes to sodomy. But what we have in this country is the opposite, as your other thoughts continually demonstrate.
Regardless, I agree that "road safety" is your business; traffic deaths are a serious problem. I just don't think that those concerns are sufficiently correlated with "has expired tags" (or the like) to make snitching morally defensible.
"On what basis..." You already agreed the rich are probably more law abiding than the poor. That's the basis. I'm sorry I'm not going to hunt up a bunch of stats or journal articles for this comment argument, but I'm not. I simply don't think, and you probably won't convince me, that de minimis law breaking, such as over tags, is indicative of significantly increased danger, in general, whether among the rich or the poor.
"The supposed inferiority..." Not their supposed inferiority. The documented fact that they commit more crimes, and many more violent crimes. I know it's very fashionable to be blind to this obvious reality, but I'm not and I won't be. Otherwise, I strongly object to your "stolen valor" analogy on its own terms. Stolen valor laws are unconstitutional.
That's not the point though. I don't pity the rich person. I don't pity anyone. I'm not a person who has pity in him (you may have noticed). My point was that it is counterproductive and illiberal. The violence and aggression of the state has to do with the illiberality of snitching, not necessarily with the likelihood that serious harm will be inflicted.
I feel it's worth noting that Matt is not enforcing (used very loosely, he is actually using a city app to alert parking enforcement so they can come check and see if a rule is being broken) tag rules for the sake of things. DC has a large number of automatic enforcement tools designed to stop people from driving at unsafe speeds in dense urban areas and school zones. Many people, a large number of which are wealthy, attempt to avoid this system by using clever tricks to deface their licence plate so the camera cannot see it. Increasingly, people purchase fake tags or register their cars in jurisdictions that do not have reciprocity of enforcement to further this goal. While most people are just trying to get out of small tickets for dangerous driving, some do this so they can commit more serious crimes. From drive-bys to a growing trend of selling stolen cars with fake plates for cash to people who really need a car, all sorts of much more serious criminal activity is facilitated by allowing lots of cars to break the "have a registered car with valid licence plates on it" rule.
I used to work in law enforcement in the bay area and a ton of people abused the old paper dealer cover plate system in CA or would do the same defacing tricks to get out of paying bridge tolls. It just so happened that doing this made your car much harder to catch with warrant-checking ALPR cameras on police cars and, as police chases became more curtailed, meant that robbery crews could escape police stops without a way to find them again (unless they had the misfortune of being stopped by the CHP, who happily chase cars). The fact that I could walk down any given street in Oakland, Berkeley or Richmond and find 1-2 cars violating the licence plate law meant that you could easily hide a more serious criminal intent in a sea of bridge toll cheats and a few people who genuinely couldn't afford their registration or forgot to put their new plates on.
I understand it is your view that licence plate rules are a "gotcha" crime and nobody should help the government enforce them, but as someone who always paid the $7 to cross the Bay Bridge, always pays his $300 registration fee and generally would not like to be run over by someone blowing a red light at dangerous speeds in dense urban areas, I am happy to see these rules be enforced.
You agree with the vast majority of this? But your comment is the complete opposite.
Your general position is 'laws should apply to people other than me, because I'm naturally law abiding'. Although maybe even more generally 'laws should only apply to poor people, because poor people (whatever that means - is eg the unemployed income poor child of a billionaire a safe, ethical driver?) are unethical and just generally bad at constantly weighing risk and assessing expected value in real time (e.g. I can reasonably run this red light because I will kill/maim fewer than X people and that's an acceptable cost/convenience ratio for me and let's ignore externalities because they have 0 value (they don't - the article is effectively about that exact point)).
So you are effectively fundamentally disagreeing with the premise of this article.
PS your theory is falsifiable - if that was really necessary - so you should be able to find any number of empirical studies to support/refute your claims.
I recall in William Stuntz' "The Collapse of American Criminal Justice" he discusses how during prohibition upperclass gentleman's clubs (not the kind of clubs referred to as such nowadays) were able to evade law enforcement better than lowerclass bars, and says there could have been a real argument that because less other crime resulted from the former than the latter this was not such a problem... but that such tensions helped to undo "America's good culture war".
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2018/06/23/the-collapse-of-american-criminal-justice/
Ok. Well my reading of that article is that they just didn't try to enforce laws in 'upper class pubs' , and, unsurprisingly, it led to "which Stuntz acknowledges may be more socially desirable if not for the reduced respect it led for the law". I.e there are unpleasant externalities - like completely undermining respect for the law - associated with arbitrary enforcement of laws which potentially completely undermines the 'ad hoc' approach.
Such an approach is simply not compatible with a legal system that is proportionate and creates, at least, a perception of equality. You appear to want a legal system that is based on real time, cost benefit analysis. For a variety of reasons in addition to the one just raised (such as lack of enforcement technology, it's fundamentally backwards looking) which, Id argue is completely incompatible with a relatively free and stable societal equilibrium. Maybe you care less about such an end state goal? (I'd be interested to know what you, as a lawyer, actually think the point of a legal system is?). You're basically describing the legal system in Russia or Zimbabwe or China or anywhere in the western world 100, 200, 300 ... years ago where, very often, rich and/or influential people openly flouted or manipulated or wrote the law to meet their needs (in modern western countries rich people just outspend everyone else).
You are confusing me with someone else. I'm a programmer, not a lawyer, and when I brought up Stuntz it wasn't to advocate a policy but instead to give that as an example of a justification for such a policy.
Sorry, my bad - that was Eöl.
The state owns the roads, issues the license plates, and the tickets. Getting the state out of this issue would require removing their responsibility for the roads.
Good write up. Does "cis-women" mean "women" (I'm not a biologist)?
"Cis" means "not trans". So cis women means women who were assigned female at birth.
'assigned' lol
This distinction can be important occasionally, eg when people try to cause outrage by saying that 'cis-women are being barred from women's Olympic events for having high testosterone levels', they are actually talking about people with intersex conditions who were raised as girls but have testes and normal male testosterone levels.