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Comment by yesenadam | Hacker News Reader

It seems ridiculous to me to assume, as you seem to, that rich=hardworking and poor=lazy. Why not rich=lazy, poor=hardworking? That seems to make at least as much sense to me, to correspond to reality.

No-one mentioned "changing the magnitude of the crime". The point is, if you get a $1000 fine, that could mean absolutely nothing to a millionaire/billionaire, but a lot to someone with $1000. Yet you talk as if fining a rich person more would be grossly unfair. Maybe you think everyone should pay the same taxes too. etc.

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This only holds for those that a born rich, or fell upon immense luck.

For those below Dubai princes, the riches come from an entirely distorted work/life balance where you are never really off-duty, and immense responsibility.

I intend to get there one day with hard work so my family can be well off. However, I do not see why it makes sense to punish me for it. Fining me twice as much because I work double the hours is unfair, and it certainly doesn't encourage growth.

Also, for us small countries up in Scandinavia, a lot of business is lost to the US (technological services) and China (manufacturing), which is a big drain on our economy. Having actual local business (rather than just occasional offices of tax-evading organisations like Apple/Amazon/Microsoft that never have any income pass through here) greatly benefits our local economies.

Even for those truly rich, they are usually rich because they know how to handle money (i.e. not wasting it on fines). The dickheads will do it regardless what it costs them, so setting a system to target them, while harming the common population, seems absurd.

> Fining me twice as much because I work double the hours is unfair, and it certainly doesn't encourage growth.

Why on earth should a fine punishing you for a crime try to encourage growth?

> I intend to get there one day with hard work so my family can be well off.

Oh, it's almost as if your kids will grow up with wealth that they didn't have to work to earn, thus not being anything to do with how hardworking or lazy they are. Almost as if they'll be born rich, falling upon immense luck.

> I intend to get there one day with hard work so my family can be well off.

One day? You mean you aren’t rich yet? Sounds to me like you’re just a lazy bum making excuses.

Hah, well, the life-reducing stress I refer to in other comments were taken from my own experience.

I'm working a full-time job, doing consultancy work on the side to help cover costs, and trying to build a company myself while doing all that.

Apart from the time spent telling people that they are wrong on the internet (which is incredibly unproductive, as it is both stressful and generally a waste of time, but https://xkcd.com/386/), I don't really have spare time. I don't have weekends, and barely lunch breaks. I go home to sleep, and wake up to work.

> Apart from the time spent telling people that they are wrong on the internet (which is incredibly unproductive ...)

Thx - I needed a laugh

You're welcome. It appears as if not many understood the sarcasm, despite the xkcd reference...

By that standard you could also propose that the poor should be fined even heavier because they are the lazy ones and should get punished for that.

There is no actual reasoning in your arguments why the fines should be the same for everybody, instead there is an argument why richer people should not be fined higher, while acknowledging that the height of a fine will impact people with differing levels of wealth in different ways.

Actually we need to think about why we are putting fines on people. The answer is: We want to deter bad behaviour. But if we take parking as an example: Some people do not mind a 25€ fine for bad parking because of their wealth so the fine doesn't work on them, while it works on other people. So our goal was to deter people from behaving in a certain way but we partially failed to do so. Now one option is to increase the ticket price for everyone (but I guess you are not arguing for that option). The other one is to attach the fine to income. The third option of doing nothing leads to a system where people can break the rules by being wealthy. But this is obviously one of the things that we seek to avoid in making rules for people to behave.

> By that standard you could also propose that the poor should be fined even heavier because they are the lazy ones and should get punished for that.

I hope that you also understand how that is absurd on its own, and that I certainly wasn't suggesting this.

However, yes, if we're seeing the entire system (including fining speeding) as a way to adjusting bad behavior, then yes, you could theoretically think of a system that directly punishes laziness.

But, wouldn't such a system already be covered by your salary, which does scale as a result of your work (i.e. you can't improve and risk losing your income entirely if you're lazy, and you're rewarded for productivity)?

> There is no actual reasoning in your arguments why the fines should be the same for everybody,

I stated... somewhere, that the magnitude of your crime does not scale with your income, so scaling the fine that way does not seem logical.

It does serve to make punishments clearer, but it still does not seem logical nor fair to me.

> Some people do not mind a 25€ fine for bad parking because of their wealth so the fine doesn't work on them, while it works on other people.

I will try to put this into a different perspective then:

A person who is 20 years old has more years to spare than one that is 50. Should they therefore get longer jail sentences?

I think that punishment should only consider the crime. Anything else is discrimination. Those with less wealth can buy fewer apples, fewer burgers, and pay for fewer speeding tickets. Such is life.

Fixing differences between wealth becomes an anti-capitalist discussion (which is fun, but a subject for another day).

> I stated... somewhere, that the magnitude of your crime does not scale with your income, so scaling the fine that way does not seem logical.

My favourite way of arguing in favour of fines proportional to wealth/ income is this: wealth is something that gives you the power to buy things: say better food, better houses, better cars, or even things that most people cannot afford, for example a big yacht. Depending on how wealthy you are, some products or services become affordable. However, there is one thing that nobody should consider affordable, and that is breaking the law, which should be equally binding for everybody. But if you set a fixed price for breaking the law, that itself becomes a product, and the price defines a set of people for whom the product is affordable and even worth the price. Is that right or desirable?

It depends on what the law is for. For example you could have a nice solid fine for littering, with half of it earmarked for public cleaning/improvement. If someone violates that and reliably pays the cost, it's win-win. They get to be lazy and the environment is improved.

Since littering means degrading the appearance of a public space for some amount of time, it's hard yo put a price on it: the maximum fine should be the cost of a person assigned exclusively to you, who immediately picks up whatever you throw to the ground and nicely dispose of it in the appropriate way. What you say would make sense in case of unpaid fares. In the case of speeding, there is no amount of money that can offset the increased risk to pedestrians and other cars.

No amount? I disagree. The speed limit is inherently a balance between safety and time-efficiency. You can convert time-efficiency into money, and figure out a monetary cost of different speeds. Even if it's an absolute mandate to keep safety levels the same, you could cut everyone else's speed by 1kph and make it up to them with a share of the money. Or you could subsidize safer cars with the money.

And at a certain price point you can call in a police escort or start installing express lanes.

There is one more obvious option: make fines not monetary but time consuming. For example you acummulate points and at certain threshold you need to do some public work, attend some courses or get some of your privileges revoked .

So, in your own words being rich does not imply anything about hard work.

Further if you actually look at the wealthy hard work has almost zero influence on the odds of being wealthy. Generally because you can pass wealth from person to person after it’s gained and the source is often just lucky.

PS: I am in my 30’s and have zero debt and six figure savings. By some standards that’s wealth by others it’s practically poverty. It’s the second version that people are talking about becase having even 7 figures in savings does not generate that much per year income. It’s when you start talking about 8-11 figures of wealth that the scale gets broken.

You seem to set income = wealth. The fines are income based, with income scaling with hard work.

That never makes a grocery worker equal a banker, but twice the hours at hourly wage means twice the income, thus twice the fine within income-based systems such as Finland.

Income does not imply wealth, but wealth does imply income.

Eventually, wealth results in income even for lazy bums. So, you can’t defend income by saying they must work hard as many of the largest incomes have nothing to do with hard work.

Wealth does not imply income. You could be a retired with a massive fortune and no income. You could be born into wealth, not actually earning any yourself.

They are different concepts. One can lead to another, by neither implies the other.

> Retired with a massive fortune.

Things of extreme value create income streams property > rent, companies > dividends, apreceation, and buybacks. Bonds > interest etc.

Even cold hard cash in a savings account generates significant income when you start talking about 100,000,000+$ just sitting there.

I know a lot more people who make $11 an hour working 60-80 hours a week than I do engineers.

Fining me twice as much because I work double the hours is unfair

That is one way to frame the situation - there are many others, but in all your comments you act as if there is only one way to frame these things - yours, and all other ways are unfair, wrong, absurd etc. I'm not sure why.

Then there's your "Life should be unfair because life's unfair" argument:

"I think that punishment should only consider the crime. Anything else is discrimination. Those with less wealth can buy fewer apples, fewer burgers, and pay for fewer speeding tickets. Such is life."

But I guess in your framing of that, it's not unfair, because everyone who has twice the money has worked twice as hard. Maybe that is the situation when you compare yourself with some people you know - I guess that's where that comes from. But using that as if it applies to everyone in the world, leads to strange conclusions, or so it seems.

I guess everyone does the "applying situations in their life to the world" thing all the time, but you sound so far right-wing, I wonder if this it where that comes from - it's not uncommon in the media to hear wealthy people calling the poor lazy, or arguing there should be no welfare etc, sounding totally selfish and heartless. As if because they're ok, everyone else should be also. Maybe they just frame things like you do - "if they had worked harder they wouldn't be poor, if so it's because they're lazy." etc.

For one thing, some people become poor because of dealing with unexpected diseases, or bad accidents, or bad luck, or divorce, or..a multitude of things. Some people become wealthy for equally random reasons. Your model totally ignores all such things, as if "shit doesn't happen" in this world. And as if everyone starts out life with the same amount in the bank.

p.s. I appreciate you writing about your experience and beliefs on this page, thanks.

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