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Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

How is it fair? I would think if two parties commit the same crime they should be charged the same. Isn't fairness in law defined as being blind to the perpetrator?

Google doesn't do stuff to be evil. It does so bc it makes economic sense on the margin. It doesn't like paying fines and arbitrary enforcement will just be used politically. You might like this case bc Google bad, but what if NBC gets fined an insane amount by current admin for their interview cropping, to discourage bad behavior, because you know, fairness.

IMO the fairway thing would be to remove as much discretion as possible so not to make things political by either side

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> How is it fair? I would think if two parties commit the same crime they should be charged the same. Isn't fairness in law defined as being blind to the perpetrator?

The purpose of a fine is not supposed to be a fee for a crime but a penalty that has deterrent effects. A flat fine is not an equal deterrent for people of different financial means.

In Finland the system is called "day fine", meaning it should match approximately a day of labor/income. In some situations you can even go to sit in prison for time proportional to the day fines, although this is nowadays rare.

Proportional to income is "the same" under the equivalence of time and money. A fine is some % of your income which is some % of your working time. The fine as a penalty should roughly be equivalent to time spent in prison, so that is some fixed amount of time which automatically translates to some lost amount of salary. Going to prison being an alternative to paying a fine when you aren't solvent.

Otherwise it isn't a penalty and is just the price of being permitted to do a thing which might be out of reach for the poor. That's just fundamentally unfair to permit the rich to do things we consider immoral if they are just able to afford it.

Non proportional fees just means there as a level of wealth where the law effectively no longer applies to you. Imagine if parking tickets cost you a penny, would you care where you parked? This is effectively the same thing.

> Isn't fairness in law defined as being blind to the perpetrator?

Fairness in this case would mean giving equal fines for equal crimes.

But equality in which units? There's a case to be made that dollars are an implementation detail and that the political system cares about utility units.

If you want the fine to equally disadvantage all parties in utility units then the dollar values are going to be different. Because the idea is that each criminal should be equally unhappy with receiving the fine.

Being charged the same percentage of income is still the same punishment. It’s a non-controversial concept in economics that there is a marginal utility to money, as in, if you have a billion dollars, then getting an extra hundred doesn’t give you more utility. However a struggling family would be thrilled at a hundred bucks and maybe that means eating for the next several days. These people should not be charged with the same static dollar amount.

It seems disingenuous to talk about marginal utility in this context, you're bringing up a non-controversial thing to try to make charging different people different dollar amounts for the same crime also seem non-controversial, which it is certainly not, at least based on the comments here.

You can say it's the same percentage so it's the same punishment, but you can't pretend this isn't a recent change in jurisprudence.

> Isn't fairness in law defined as being blind to the perpetrator?

If you jail different people, they lose out on different amounts of income. Is that unfair?

Now remove the physical jail component and keep the rest of the punishment. Is that unfair?

If anything, jailing a low income worker means they loose their job and have trouble finding another one after getting out while jailing a business owner or stock trader etc. will mostly mean they are in the same position when they get out as when they were jailed.

Similar, even fines proportional to income are still unfair because to determine how much a fine hurts you need to compare it to whats left of the income after basic needs have been paid for. For someone that has much more than they need, getting fined 50% of their income will suck but not immediately change their lifestyle while someone who is living paycheck to paycheck is going to be ruined by the same percentage fine.

There is one side of the political spectrum that feels that the penalty for a crime should be set irrespective of the perpetrator because that's fair. Two people that commit the same infraction pay the same absolute amount.

There is another side that feels the penalty should "hurt" the same amount because that's fair. Two people that commit the same infraction feel the same amount of pain (theoretically), roughly corresponding to paying the same relative amount.

IMO this falls apart when you accept the almost tautological fact that these laws are enforced selectively, so "fairness" goes out the window almost immediately. Enforcement is used as political pressure and as punishment. Under that view, the second option above feels much worse than the first.

Even if enforcement was "unfair" (let's ignore for a fact that this is not a binary determination and not being able to be perfect isn't an argument for not trying) then everyone having the potential to experience the same hurt from the unfair system is still more fair than a corrupt society where some people can have their lives destroyed by an unfair fine but others can just shrug it off.

I agree it's not a binary thing but you're still viewing it as "an unfair system that is trying its best" vs. "a corrupt society" and my entire point is that is a completely false dichotomy. As Madison said, "enlightened men will not always be at the helm" - you have to design your system in such a way that bad actors are limited in their scope.

Proportional fees "hurt" everyone the same and give the government the discretion to "hurt" whomever they choose via malicious prosecution and selective enforcement. Flat-rate fees at minimal amounts save most people from this corruption. If the difference is between a flat rate penalty that hurts 5% of society if imposed, and a proportional penalty that hurts 100% of society if imposed, how is the first one not objectively better in the nearly certain scenario of a bad actor being in charge at some point in the future?

> How is it fair? I would think if two parties commit the same crime they should be charged the same.

I think the reasoning as that when Google does it, it affects far more people than if (say) I sold a single phone with only my own apps pre-installed. Should I be fined $55 million?

Wow people actually think like this? Have you ever been poor? Genuinely wondering.

10% hurts the same no matter your income.

Fines are about punishment and deterrence. You cant deter a millionaire with a 100$ fine like you can a pensioner on a fixed 1000$ income.

You actually need to have it scale beyond a flat percentage to be punitive. Someone getting fined 10% of their fixed income can end up homeless. A billionaire getting fined won’t see their lifestyle impacted at all.

And not based on income alone, but including their entire net worth.

> 10% hurts the same no matter your income.

10% is more just. Than a flat fine.

But 10% hurts more when you are poor and have no savings and you need that money to pay rent. For small companies is the same. Bigger corporations have more resources available to minimize that 10% impact. Power does not scale linearly with money.

But to take a percentage is a much better way than a flat fine. Flat fines are totally ineffective when applied to big corporations.

> 10% hurts the same no matter your income.

No, 10% of income doesn't hurt the same no matter your income. (Even if you ignore the relationship loose correlations between income and savings that can be used to cushion the effects of unexpected expenses, and assume neither party has any such resources.)

While fungibility pushes slows the decline compared to less-fungible goods, declining marginal utility applies to income, too, which means not only does a flat fine have less impact on the rich, so does a flat percentage.

(This gets even more true when you do consider savings, etc.)

Agreed, but a percentage fine is still a much more effective deterrent than a flat fee which becomes insignificant much more quickly.

Even better might be a percentage of disposable income but even that is not going to be enough and with more complexity in the rules comes more opportunity for creative accounting which again benefits those more well off.

10% of the worth of all assets then.

Id rather have it scale badly than not at all though.

Leaving a second comment to provide another perspective.

The more your wealth (and note that income is a crude approximation here), the easier your ability to pay. Hopefully you agree that a $50 parking fine means virtually nothing to a billionaire; it may as well not exist. Whereas to someone living at the poverty line, it is incredibly significant.

If you feel it's fair to penalize everyone the same absolute amount of money, that means you believe that rich people have effectively earned themselves a right(!) to violate laws that poor people can't afford to.

Or, putting it more bluntly, it means you think rich people are superior to poor people.

Is that fair?

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