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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

China may be on to something. White-collar crime convictions should include restrictions like that unless and until all losses and fines have been repaid. You can fly, but only in coach. You can't fly in a private aircraft. You can't have a credit card above the low-end level. You can't be an officer or director of a company. You can't play golf on a public course. You have to file taxes with the standard deduction.

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It's easy to go to far with those by accident. Examples:

- no private aircraft - what about rural doctors and farmers?

- no high end credit card - so you want them to pay more (higher interest) to the banks, because... why?

- can't be a director - so do you just take their company from them? who do you give it to? how does that help repay debt?

- no golf - so if someone's a professional golfer/trainer you're stripping them of a job that would help repay the debt?

Almost all these ideas are like debtors prison - maybe feels good to kick the guilty, but does society benefit?

> - no private aircraft - what about rural doctors and farmers?

The day that a rural doctor or farmer is indicted for defrauding investors for hundreds of millions of dollars, that objection might make sense.

Not investors, but I don't see why they couldn't defraud people for large amount via scams.

It isn't so out of the question for folks to cheat on their taxes and get caught for it. This happens at all levels of society. It doesn't have to be for much money, after all, just enough to help folks survive. With the US tax code as-is, it is actually pretty easy.

But why? They are already getting prison sentence for it.

The problem is that all the punishment is actually cost society money and productivity. Like telling people that they can’t get education because of whatever is huge net negative to society.

For the sake of argument: US universities argue the importance of personality scores. Couldn't social credit be interpreted in the same way? Maybe society stands to gain if more reputable and trustworthy people get the top education spots?

That argument doesn't work for banning the children of people with debts though.

I would expect most people who argue against the social credit system to also argue against those personality scores.

Based on the article, it appears that the blacklists are used to punish instances where someone was ordered to pay a fine but didn't comply. I think in pretty much any western country, that would result in a prison sentence in itself, but apparently not in China. So those limitations that are put on blacklisted persons are essentially a half-prison: not complete restriction of movement, but enough to serve as punishment. From that viewpoint, it might actually be cheaper to enforce than a prison sentence. It certainly seems to be preferable to the Chinese authorities who came up with the system.

Whoa there. Not paying a fine in a western country doesn’t necessarily (and doesn’t often) lead to jail time. Civil penalties are not easily converted into criminal ones, for obvious reasons (they punish poorer offenders for not being rich).

I'm most familiar with the situation in Germany [1] where you either have to pay your fines, prove that you can't pay (in which case the fine is deferred or split into smaller installments) or get detained in prison for up to six weeks (or three months for multiple fines).

Of course most people do end up complying in one way or another (which means that the fine is eventually paid, even if very poor people might need many small installments).

I'm pretty sure that most other countries will also eventually threaten to imprison someone if they make no effort to pay a fine, otherwise many people would simply ignore them and never pay.

[1] https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_owig/englisch_ow...

No, that definitely isn’t true in the USA. I didn’t realize Germany was so backwards.

They will seize your assets, garnish your wages, but they won’t send you to jail, how would you even pay then?

It's exactly the same in US

https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/02/09/384968360...

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