What is the purpose of issuing laws/regulations without penalty? (2017) | Hacker News Reader

What is the purpose of issuing laws/regulations without penalty? (2017)

politics.stackexchange.com

79 pointssearchableguy16 comments

I'll tell you, I hate the idea of half-measures like laws that don't get enforced. (I'm not talking about hundreds-of-years-old archaic laws that are ignored by everyone, I mean real current laws that have some implications. )

Why? Because good law-abiding people -- we want people like that, right? -- follow them with inconvenience and cost to themselves, while the people who don't care just go on with the undesired activity the law is aimed at. Think about when you have had to pay extra or buy something, or do something where you found out no one was actually following up on it.

This creates a lot of frustration among the law-abiding. If you can't see that and understand why that's a problem, you need to seriously think about it -- if you're of the opinion "what harm can it do?" or kind of "go with the flow" about it. Just try taking an example from what you would feel at work if this kind of thing allowed to happen. You would not be pleased.

I have to say, that is in no small measure a certain part of why people are unhappy right now in public discourse. It seems like everyone is picking and choosing the laws they feel like following. And the law-abiding on every side are asking, "why are we suckers for wanting laws to be enforced"? Pick the issue and you'll find examples of it. Maybe we should retreat a little from our self-confidence and think "maybe I should follow rules even if I don't agree with them" -- inject a little of this approach for everyone's benefit until we figure out what's wrong with us lately.

If so many people don't wanna follow all the laws maybe there's too many laws.

That's short sighted and I'm guessing, wrong.

People, in general, don't want to follow speed limits when they are comfortable with a road or running a little late. This doesn't in any way mean there are too many laws or even that the speed limit is too low. It is just an instance of not wanting to follow laws.

In Indiana, people are required to pay sales tax on online orders. Voluntarily. Technically, you can be charged the tax, but there is little enforcement and little voluntary tax paying. This doesn't mean there are too many laws. The problem here is generally that it is too cumbersome to follow: If the sales tax is added at point of purchase, people pay since there is no need for recordkeeping or saving money for tax time.

Sometimes, laws simply aren't aligned with the wants/needs of the people. I think this is a large part of why states are decriminalizing recreational and medical pot: It more reflects the will of the people and enforcement doesn't help the population. Enforcement simply costs money and tends to ruin lives (by putting a drug charge on their record for something less destructive than alcohol).

A contractor might cut corners to save money. It doesn't mean we should have fewer building codes, though, since so many are there to keep folks safe.

Not wanting to follow laws doesn't mean too many laws.

Low probability selective and/or random enforcement is a pernicious effect. The real effect of a speed limit that’s too low according to most road users is not to declare society’s intentions about how you should drive. It’s a way to fund the police department by taxing the unlucky, at best. And more likely a pretext to pull people over for looking like they don’t belong. Contemporary traffic engineers understand that you modulate speed with road design, not signs.

> Because good law-abiding people ... follow them with inconvenience and cost to themselves...

Maybe this provides the required benefit to society and enforcement would only increase the costs. Given that there is a heavy discretionary component to the justice system that reinforces broader power dynamics in society, these costs are likely to be borne by the have-nots rather than than the haves. There's very little benefit to society in squeezing blood from a stone.

> Maybe we should retreat a little from our self-confidence and think "maybe I should follow rules even if I don't agree with them"...

Perhaps it is worth obeying trifling laws for the purpose of living and letting live. But there are also a great many unjust laws. I'm not sure you're being entirely fair to your fellow citizen, here. How are people meant to have a respectful relationship with the law when some are hardly punished and some receive what amounts to summary execution?

I believe the problem with our discourse today is that it has been sabotaged in small ways meant to protect the powerful in the short term, and toxicity has built up to a very dangerous degree. I don't believe we're especially less law abiding than we have been previously.

That being said, there are a great many laws I would like to see enforced more rigorously. Especially in the area of white collar crime.

>I'll tell you, I hate the idea of half-measures like laws that don't get enforced. (I'm not talking about hundreds-of-years-old archaic laws that are ignored by everyone, I mean real current laws that have some implications. )

So I guess you start your post by deciding which laws you choose to follow or not, pretty much discrediting the rest of your post, but anyway...

>Why? Because good law-abiding people -- we want people like that, right? --

Good and law abiding aren't necessarily the same thing. Let's take for example

This guy and a law that's common across American cities, it's illegal in many places to feed the homeless.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/11/90-year-old-flo...

Now, I'm sure there's arguments against this, but i feel like giving someone food who needs it is an objectively good thing. Though, in many places, by doing so, you are breaking the law and in fact, by blindly following said law, you are in fact, doing something not so good.

>with the undesired activity the law is aimed at.

Laws are written by people just like us, what's undesirable for some isn't undesirable for all, or even a majority.

>Think about when you have had to pay extra or buy something, or do something where you found out no one was actually following up on it.

I remember a pretty clear moment when this happened to me, but I ended up coming to the opposite conclusion.

A few years back I went to a concert at a small venue, like a really tiny venue. We were some of the first people there and nobody really paid attention to us when we got there but being 'good' obedient folks, we helpfully found someone and asked about paying the cover and forked out the $15 each or whatever.

As more people started to show up though, we noticed only a handful of people actually ended up paying for the show, only the people that ended up walking over and asking about it. Most people just walked in, sat down and never paid.

I wasn't bitter about it though, I just learned never show up early and never offer money you're not asked for, whatever the sign says.

>This creates a lot of frustration among the law-abiding.

Life's full of frustration, becoming frustrated at people's actions based only on principle is a waste of time and energy.

>Maybe we should retreat a little from our self-confidence and think "maybe I should follow rules even if I don't agree with them" -- inject a little of this approach for everyone's benefit until we figure out what's wrong with us lately.

Why? Rules should be based on logic and common sense if a rule is arbitrary and has no basis in reality then why? You started your post by saying if laws make no sense, they don't count, but you finish your post by saying everyone should follow the rules, even if they don't agree with them.

It’s to solidify a certain position before someone can. Suppose a state or states have a law that is consumer friendly and has teeth behind it through private right of action and penalties. Businesses don’t like that so they lobby US senators and Reps to pass a law that preempts those state laws it has no enforcement or penalties. Even better, the new law will, on the surface, appear to “take the issue seriously.” But how can it if it has no penalty? This can happen on the state level too—a good example is the Michigan VRPA which sought to limit data sharing through penalty. It started to work, so state legislature took away the penalties. Oh well.

There might be no penalty for breaking a regulation but if you do that and cause harm, then you are at fault, which obviously has legal consequences.

I think a large part of the road code is like that in many places.

Unless there's breach of contract involved you've usually got a basic tort lawsuit. The bar for civil infraction charge is generally lower in practice than for a tort judgement. The state can pass whatever stupid law it wants and then get conviction based on the fact that the law was broken even if nobody is injured. For a lawsuit you need injury. A prior civil or criminal case can be pointed to in order to establish a fact pattern but a fact pattern doesn't win you a lawsuit.

That said, in reality there's generally an exception if the person you're suing is a class of person that doesn't in practice get equal protection under the law (people who are drunk when the problem happened and people who have been convicted of certain crimes are the most common classes of people who suffer this fate).

This might be a very naive take, but perhaps you need to spell out what people are supposed to do, so they can do it? "Murder bad" is obvious, but there's a ton of much subtler regulations that might not be obvious or intuitive unless they're explicitly written down.

And, more importantly perhaps, for most legal systems, interpretation of things not explicitly enumerated is pretty unclear. It's a little bit like "undefined behavior" in a C compiler, only half jokingly allowed to do anything up to and including rm-rf'ing the machine you're running it on.

But if there is no penalty, you are just limiting rule followers while giving advantage to rule breakers.

It's strange that a comment like this is downvoted.

I agree wholeheartedly. A law without enforcement is pressuring people not to follow it. I think generally everyone understands that (hence tax laws are enforced), but it's a more practical approach: you can never get 100% of the population to comply, and you don't need to. If you can achieve the minimum desired compliance without spending money on enforcement, you have what you need and saved money.

It's naive, because it discounts the damage it does to lawfulness. When people see that law-breakers are not punished (and are defacto rewarded in most cases), they lose respect for the law, the state the is supposed to uphold the law, and the states' institutions. I believe we can witness that in many Western societies.

Murder investigations don't make a lot of sense economically, in most cases. Unless it's a serial killer or a career criminal, the chances are slim to none that they will commit the same crime again, so why -in that line of thinking- should we spend money on finding out who did it and then imprison them for even more money, especially when, ostensibly, our prison system isn't for punishment? It wouldn't be a problem to let the few murderers in modern European societies go free, but it would create a giant problem by what it does to the population.

That’s assuming everyone sees every law as a limitation or restriction. Some people see the benefit to all of obeying the rules; to them complying is a benefit in itself, and violators harm themselves

Because if you put important people in office, public servants cannot earn $5MM a year, or more, when they return to private practice.

google: Eric Holder

Purpose is to get the money and to shift the blame to employers since they "were told" to renegotiate. So suck it up employees.

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