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Comment by beaglesss | Hacker News Reader

I would argue if the goal is justice then the fine is basically a tort on the externality imposed. At some point society imposes an injustice if the fine exceeds the externality imposed by tailgating, even if it's a pittance to the rich person.

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

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But the point of the fine in this case is clearly not restitution, but disincentive. Justice in this case is ensuring everyone is equally incentivised to follow a law that society thinks everyone should follow.

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.

It's fair to say and, on some level, I like the idea of scaling fines to lower income more than scaling them to higher incomes. The marginal utility of wealth goes down as you get more anyway.

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.

But without progressive fines, the rich can basically buy themselves out of the law, which is worse than having no proportionality to the offense.

Reminds me of this podcast, “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie… Will He Want a Welfare Check?”

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...

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