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Comment by nickthemagicman | Hacker News Reader

That 50k is an arbitrary number and can be lowered at any moment. Rich people's problems may one day be everyone's problems. This is a scary law on my limited understanding.

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There are lots of laws with arbitrary numbers in them. That's because don't get justice from fair laws, you get justice from a fair legal system.

You can have the bestest and fairestest laws in the world, that doesn't give you anything if you are facing a corrupt legal system.

If you've got a ridiculous code of law and a somewhat competent legal system, you should be fine.

So, in my opinion you should be worried to get competent people into the right places.

The problem with slippery slope arguments is that they need to show that the initial step taken somehow leads to the bad outcome mentioned. The obvious solution is to stay at 50k. I think that the political situation still would create a huge uproar if it were lowered significantly.

So for a slippery slope argument to be valid in this case, you would have to show that governments (or the UK government specifically) tend to slowly expand their repressive powers?

You can use the exact same argument to argue that the speed limit will decrease forever.

and what if the 50k figure never changes?

50k will conveniently be worth less over a few decades - the slippery slope is a built-in feature unless actively changed

    Rich people's problems may one day be everyone's problems.

That's a worthy dream. But in the last 1000 years it hasn't become a reality.

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