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Comment by SECProto | Hacker News Reader

People get tickets for violating motor vehicle laws. These laws exist to protect all users of the road. If you can't follow the rules, you don't get to operate a vehicle that can easily kill other users. The only issue with license suspensions as a result of unpaid tickets, is that you can pay the ticket to buy your way out - an issue most places rectify by having a points system, so that drivers can't violate the law repeatedly just because they can pay.

> On places people have no other ways to move around, this is a human rights violation. Nothing less.

By this argument, driving tests should be illegal too. Or age limits on licensing. Or fees to renew plates or permits. If there's a "human rights violation", it's letting motorists known to repeatedly violate the law (putting my life in danger) continue to operate a vehicle.

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The safety of other people does not hinge on money, other than liability insurance.

If you want to correct someone's bad or even intentionally irresponsible driving, there is nothing about the problem that implies money.

In fact it's if anything, the opposite. Making the penalty for a ticket be money just means I can just pay the ticket like paying for the priviledge to ignore that rule.

In fact I do this wrt to the front plate on one of my cars where it would be ugly. I don't want a plate there, but this state's rules say otherwise, but I get to just have what I want anyway. Once in a while, I get a ticket for it. I just pay it and continue not having a license plate on the front of that car. It's been over 20 years and several cars.

How nice for me that the penalty for this important rule is just money!

> I can just pay

No, you've mis-identified the problem as "the punishment is only a single sum of money."

What actually makes it ineffective is "it's a fixed sum which some people (like me) are rich enough to casually ignore". Compounded by "infrequent enforcement."

The truth of this is easy to illustrate: Simply imagine that instead of a ~$100 fine every ~5 years, the missing plate was detected every week and the fine compounded by +5% each time until it reached 10% of your wages. It's technically still "just money"... but would your behavior be the same?

Just raises the bar. It's still a penalty that doesn't relate to the misdeed, and hurts different people differently.

The problem is we use money as a form of pain, because that is one facet of it, money can sure hurt, but taking money from one person is like taking away a finger or a leg, decimating their ability to function at all things in life, and then everyone punishes that person even more, now for not being a productive contributing member of society. Meanwhile another person can supply "fingers" all day and not be even inconvenienced let alone handicapped.

But taking money as a form of pain appeals to assholes, and funds their organizations, win-win!

> Just raises the bar.

Uh, yeah, because you claimed it was a fundamentally weak bar people could walk though. I raised it to illustrate you were actually stepping over it instead.

> It's still a penalty that doesn't relate to the misdeed

They are literally related by cause and effect. Trying to force some broader poetic Hammurabi-style connection is a non-starter, since it means my overdue library book would require a local librarian to break into my home and seize one of my own books as a hostage.

As amusing as that sounds, the abstraction of an overdue-book fine is wayyyy more practical and easier to do in a just and proportionate way. (Especially if all the books I have are from other libraries.)

> hurts different people differently

Which is why fines should be scaled better, like I said in my last post, rather than being fixed sums that some can ignore, like you described in yours.

> The problem is we use money as a form of pain

Anything the transgressor doesn't like is going to be a form of "pain", the least we can do is use something which is both (A) adjustable and (B) reversible.

Perhaps the problem is that we us the same money for both necessities and luxuries.

It allows assholes to decide to see everything as a luxury that someone they don't like doesn't deserve.

There is nothing about a traffic infraction that requires money as the penalty, instead of say, an annoying class or community service, or limiting their use of a vehicle to work or school, which is a thing that is done sometimes.

Money is just easy for the administrator at the (no pun) expense of the subjects. That's a shit reason to do something that way. But the majority of the rule-makers and system-designers are people that this setup doesn't harm. What a strange coincidense! That right there blows all these crybaby excuses how it would just be so hard to even try to think of anything else right out of the water.

The money is the economic incentive. The points resulting in license suspension fills the other loophole.

> Once in a while, I get a ticket for it. I just pay it and continue not having a license plate on the front of that car

Yes, I agree - your state shouldn't have this loophole. Since the economic penalty doesn't work, you should also be receiving non-monetary penalties for this behaviour that would have resulted in revocation of your driving permit (and further violations would be criminal).

You shoulda decided whether this is a "economic sanction" infraction or a "we can't let you drive for safety reason" infraction. If you decided it's the former, you shouldn't get to change it to the latter just because it turns out the driver can't pay.

The fine is intended to curb the poor behavior. If they can’t (or won’t) pay then it seems reasonable to proceed to a different punishment to curb that behavior.

I’m all for pegging fines to income to reduce the likelyhood that fines cause serious harm to violators, beyond the desired effect. But at some point it may not be possible to do anything but take a license.

> The fine is intended to curb the poor’s behavior.

Fixed that for you.

> I’m all for pegging fines to income

Yes, I covered that in my comment about points systems (they exist everywhere I've lived - get too many tickets and your license is suspended, regardless of if you pay it off). Unless you mean that there should be no fee to renew your license, no nandatory insurance, no gas taxes, etc?

Things like not having a license plate on the front wouldn't normally come with points no matter how many times you were caught.

Yes, that is an issue and should be corrected. Every monetary penalty should also contribute towards license revocation.

That is quit frankly silly penaltes should just be scaled based on income

¿Por Qué No Los Dos? You're setting up a false-dichotomy where the only valid reaction to unsafe-driving is waiting for a major disaster and then taking their license away entirely.

Compare to: "OSHA shouldn't be fining MegaCo for lacking metal safety-railings around the ManMangler 4000 unit, because if it was reeeealy about safety they'd shut down the entire factory until it was safe. Fines prove they aren't serious about safety and have some other dubious motive."

Fines are a totally valid way to change behavior and deter the unsafe behavior from happening again in the future. They are both adjustable and reversible, unlike imprisonment or eye-for-an-eye. While I would love to see fines scaled by wealth to avoid disproportionately severe (or ineffective) effects, that's not the same as rejecting fines entirely.

Wow, talk about taking a comment to an absurd point.

If OSHA was serious about safety, they would shut the offending machine down until remedied.

If there's enough problems in a facility, then they shut the whole place down.

But therein lies the problem - then the employees don't get paid. The "fine" should go to the employees for endangerment and payment of lack of work.

But no, fines.

> Wow, talk about taking a comment to an absurd point.

I think the one that "took a comment to an absurd point" is the one about driving being a human right.

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