Swiss BMW Driver Slammed with $116,000 Tailgating Fine Because He's Rich
thedrive.com
thedrive.com
For example, many crypto-bros are insanely poor on paper.
Companies can spend on behalf of a person, etc.
A more fair system is to be able to pick between jail or community service.
Time is equally precious to all humans and giving some of your time to repair your mistakes is the best you can do.
I'm not sure what factor we should use but I think that it should quickly become economically infeasible for anyone to keep reoffending because the cost of separate instances of doing so quickly escalates. Maybe exponentially?
People are free to do their own personal cost benefit analysis when they decide whether or not whatever personal circumstance they're in is worth breaking the law, and the law isn't there to give them a pass because their personal analysis on this resulted in them deciding to break the law.
Is there any evidence of egregious behaviour from Swedish and Finnish law enforcement in the manner that you describe?
Its like robbing a bank and when caught you need to give 10% back. And also you will be given stern warning to not do it again.
The reality is somewhat different.
Why not a fraction of the current value of gross assets at the time of investigation? This a much better reflection of someone's financial standing, is a greater deterrent, ensures that the fine is actually payable, and deals with the issue of the rich not having much in the way of income.
While this theoretically allows the rich to drive said $500 car in order to minimize their liability in the event of a fine, it also means the rich have to drive a $500 car if that is what they are trying to optimize for, which is a decent social tradeoff.
Though it hurts poor people who prioritize their car over other essentials.
That is, for justice rather than just retribution, I think the real nominal cost of tailgating is probably not closely linked to wealth or income of the offender
I also think that, if you wanna critique the efficacy of fines in metting out justice, you need to go further than you do here. Scaling the fine tries, imperfectly, to match the punishment to the circumstances of the offender. We could imagine an even better system that more perfectly reacts to misbehavior, but exactly what that would be seems hard and this is a sensible adjustment to an existing system.
If the goal were only to ascribe economic harms to certain actions and reclaim those costs, it would be called a tax or a fee, not a fine.
The argument being if fines for breaking rules are not proportional to wealth, then wealthy people will become disdainful of those rules.
https://slate.com/podcasts/decoder-ring/2024/09/how-if-you-g...
Wealthy people don't break the law any more than less wealthy people even though the naive view of the economic costs of crime would have you think they would.
Keeps your income private from cops + uses existing mechanism of determining your income.
I was surprised to learn that the UK experimented with it, briefly, but it's something that exists in several other countries for example Finland has had the system since 1921.
The funny thing about this opinion is that it is both extremely widely shared and extremely unpopular, depending on the context. Just seems invasive to me for a court to demand your personal monetary situation when determining how much to punish you.
The flip side to this is no-cash bail and people being allowed back on the streets after committing awful anti-social crimes. In NYC some people get released on no cash bail for 2nd degree manslaughter. But you know, economic circumstances
https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/all-crimes-new-york-bai...
If fines don't scale with wealth, they mean the activity is only illegal for the poor & middle class.
Principles are principles for a reason. You don't hold equal treatment / punishment under the law as a principle. Equal does not mean relative to something.
Imagine it were prison. Should we say that a rich person should get a 1 day sentence and a poor person should get a 1 year sentence simply because the rich person's time is worth more?
A 20 year old probably has 60 years left. Spending a year in prison for a 20 year old is only 1/60th his expected life span. But for a 50 year old it would be 1/30th his life span. So perhaps the young person should get a harsher penalty.
You see why this is wrong?
I don't really think my example is terrible, I think it depends on what you think of as "equal". If the idea is to disincentivize an action, it needs to have a similar amount of pain to all people, presumably.
day-fine = punishment financially equivalent to incarceration for one day without salary.
Rich and poor get the same number of days "without salary". There's also a minimum fine. People with no income will still pay a fine.
Yes, the total value of the fine is less for someone with no money, but has the same impact the same because it is the same portion of their overall income.
Just like "if you have no money, you should be able to live in country more cheaply by paying less in taxes".
Thousands of people die in car related situations. Most of them are preventable if people would just drive they are told in drivers ed. Don't tailgate is a big on as it means when (not if!) someone makes a mistake there is enough time and space to take evasive action. Many other safety laws exist that people think nothing of violating.
Fines for doing 10 km/h over posted speed, etc doesn't have be so draconian.
What if the default punishment was instead a nice, equitable 21 days in jail for rich and poor alike, with the option to instead pay a fine of 21 days income, if you were willing to disclose your income?
The law is: your fine amount is based on your daily income.
This law is applied equally.
Otherwise most rich people will only consider them a mere inconvenience, like in most countries.
Here in Poland I have met too many corpo-achievers literally bragging that they just put all their speeding tickets on the corpo-card because it's _peanuts_, so they drive as fast and as loose as they feel...
And no, things are not simple, but fines being proportional to income is better than fixed fines.
I think there's a big difference between what people say (the poor shouldn't be massively overburdened by a traffic fine, which most people would support), and what many advocates of these policies are actually motivated by (make the rich pay reeeee), which is silly schadenfreude I won't support.
I would argue that fixing that is important, even without income-based fines. Particularly if you have things like civil forfeiture (which also needs some fixing and really sounds like something that belongs in a banana republic).
They also don't have the government sanctioned theft through the ridiculous notion of civil forfeiture...
If we want to prohibit an activity, having a fine that's the same in dollars is not great because of the whole inconvenience-fee thing. If the purpose of the fine is punishment and deterrence it is ineffective.
If we want to have less of an activity but reach a quantity where there's a equilibrium between the social costs and social benefits for the activity, then that's really a tax. And it should be uniform and not vary based on income.
Which is tailgating?
What is actually properly ridiculous is that some people get enough money that a linear fine seems ridiculous. Income distribution is completely out of whack.
I bet the f*cker stops now.
Perhaps a % of their assets should be put into government trust which is realised when they liquidate?
Equity is by definition relative. Equality is at least absolutely reasoned without the interference of relativity or subjectivity.
By what measure can a system of government be most fair and immune to corruption? The one where everyone has equal rights or the one one where some are “more equal” or “less equal” than others?
How is the number of days determined - is it fixed by type of offense?
Income proportional fines should also have an alternative minimum fine that weighs their entire liquid balance sheet value because it's entirely possible decamillionaires to billionaires keep their live expenses allowances low compared to vast assets they control.
How much was the public hurt by his actions?
There are so many possibilities to make costly "lessons" if you do not prepare in advance. I lived in Zurich - lovely country, but what in other countries is more or less tolerated or fined with a price tag of two McDonalds menus, can hit you very hard.
A parking violation and driving a bit too fast downhill (it's a hilly region, isn't it?) because you overlooked a sign, and not only ordinary people will wish they were billionaires.
Not even close, even for the more general superalative meaning of most.
Lots of Swiss drive, car and gas prices are more affordable than the rest of Europe, many Swiss live outside of big cities where parking is harder/expensive. I even saw a drive thru at a McDonalds in Renens (suburb near Lausanne), which...I've never seen a drive thru at McDonalds anywhere else in Europe (although I only lived in Switzerland).
Yes, Switzerland is very law and order, you follow the rules (like in Germany). But it is definitely a place where you can drive if you want, and many people do.