Comment by clarkmoody | Hacker News Reader

Comment by clarkmoody | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

This is why there should be fewer laws, with proper penalties for those laws. Many of our laws are designed to prevent us from doing worse things.

Imagine driving on a residential street at 60 mph. That in and of itself is not a problem (other than noise), but hitting something at that speed most certainly is, especially in a neighborhood. Likewise, drunk driving is not a problem until you hit someone or crash yourself. Not coming to a complete stop at a 4-way stop sign. (all traffic examples, sorry)

Those traffic behaviors are not destructive, until something goes wrong. So if we reduce the law count but increase penalties, we're on the right track. For instance, if we really want to stop the effects of drunk driving, we have 30 days jail time for the first offense.

I think that if we had the proper (minimum) set of laws, then we should have no problem with 100% enforcement.

Now, on the issue of privacy, actually achieving 100% enforcement would be impossible without a complete surveillance state (or zero laws, but this is the trivial case).

We do have the power to change the direction of this country, and the author of the article points to gay marriage and pot use to champion this idea of liberty. But the author also points at the sheer scope of federal law as a huge problem. If the government has a problem with you, they can (probably) put you behind bars -- and this is a problem indeed.

So how should you vote? Vote for candidates who want to reduce the burden of government on the people and enhance personal freedom. I contend that gay marriage wouldn't even be an issue if the government weren't involved in marriage in the first place (and it shouldn't be). The Left loves tearing down the moral codes of previous generations, claiming bigotry, homophobia, etc., but it also loves to build up government in a huge way. The Republicans, unfortunately, have lost the way of small government, but I believe they are a better hope than the Dems, in the long run.

Your idea simply doesn't work, because people are terrible at evaluating risk and consequences. For example, say we abolished all the traffic laws and said that drivers would be responsible for any damage they cause. You'd end up with less experienced drivers doing 80mph through a residential area, since there's no speed limit. The penalty for their poor judgement is a dead kid who happened to chase a ball. But since this "seems" like a less likely event, the driver doesn't worry, until its too late.

We experimented with lax traffic laws, and accidents were far more common per mile driven than they are today.

Actually, the current thinking and observation by some urban designers is that "naked roads" can result in safer driving habits[1][2]. The problem is one of environment, design, and policy.

"There is a clear link between people's surroundings and their behaviour. If people are in an unpleasant environment, they will behave badly." - Ben Hamilton-Baillie

Also, in Montana, for example, adding speed limits to interstates which previously had none resulted in more traffic fatalities[3]

1. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4213221.stm

2. http://www.salon.com/2004/05/20/traffic_design/

3. http://www.motorists.org/press/montana-no-speed-limit-safety...

There are also "traffic calming" designs (some of which incorporate naked roads concepts) which can reduce accidents.

David Snowden (I ran across his name searching for items related to another Snowden in the news) mentions in a YouTube video a roundabout in England which, despite its visually frightening appearance and apparently very high traffic densities, is one of the safest intersections in the UK.

Traffic calming can be an issue though, because it reduces traffic speeds, which can actually increase overall risk when it slows down emergency vehicles. Especially in residential areas, you can end up reducing the number of minor traffic accidents at the expense of increasing the number of non-traffic-related fatalities by increasing the emergency response time of fire trucks and ambulances.

This is a non-problem:

1) The other road users are operating at a slower speed so it is considerably easier to get out of the way.

2) emergency access is affected by the issue causing the emergency ( a crash for example )

3) normal congestion will put the effective speed lower anyhow.

4) traffic calming can actually increase the throughput of a street For example, converting a street with 2 lanes each direction to a single lane with a central left turn lane: eliminates the congestion caused by people stopping to make turns from the left lane.

>The other road users are operating at a slower speed so it is considerably easier to get out of the way.

You're assuming the other traffic is the problem. Speed humps etc. will considerably slow down e.g. a fire truck even if there are zero other cars on the road.

>emergency access is affected by the issue causing the emergency ( a crash for example )

Again, you're assuming traffic to be the primary problem. If my house is on fire or there is some intruder then there will be negligible effect on the local traffic but structural impediments to haste will still delay the emergency response.

>normal congestion will put the effective speed lower anyhow.

Traffic again.

>traffic calming can actually increase the throughput of a street For example, converting a street with 2 lanes each direction to a single lane with a central left turn lane: eliminates the congestion caused by people stopping to make turns from the left lane.

That's not really traffic calming, or to the extent that it is, should be distinguished from what I'm complaining about, e.g. speed humps or other measures solely designed to reduce traffic speed or annoy motorists into being diverted onto other roads.

Also, the better solution in such cases is to make the road have 2 lanes in each direction and a central left turn lane.

The number of people driving 80mph through a residential area each year would be about the same as it is today: approximately zero. There are far fewer psychopaths than you think, and psychopaths are largely undissuaded by laws.

You don't have to be a psychopath to be young and inexperienced, nor to want to flaunt your disregard for safety.

My larger point is that smaller laws help curb behavior that leads to larger consequences.

If you're young and inexperienced, or want to flaunt your disregard for safety, a "Speed Limit 25" sign won't dissuade you either. It might even persuade you.

One thing with the 100% enforcement principle is that the majority of the laws being overturned today are those that never should have existed in the first place, because they were legislating morals where behavior never hurt anyone else besides their "beliefs". Any behavior that doesn't cause harm to another human being (which can ethically be argued to include oneself or not, but the former makes things much more complicated) should not be illegal. Behaviors proven to cause harm to other human beings (like the drunk driving you suggest), even if unintentional, have the effect of high likelihood of harm to others, and are also valid. Criminalize and legislate away things that harm others. And you need the ability to scientifically verify direct harm or exceedingly high correlations between behavior and harm to outlaw or regulate some behavior.

That means public nudity is legal, nothing about same sex should exist, you can smoke whatever you want (unless it kills you, or permanently maims you, which is why I think self-harm being legal is acceptable, and you should only criminalize the acts of harming others) but not be mentally compromised in public, you can grow whatever you want, you can bear firearms but not take them in public (unless unloaded), you would set speed limits to the first standard deviation of the average speed of a road (ie, the bounds of safety) rather than some arbitrary unrealistic number that causes everyone to speed, etc.

I mean, hell, you could make this very simple in what is criminal:

* Do not directly endanger others excessively through reckless behavior or use of dangerous tools.

* Do not actively hurt another through physical or excessive emotional violence (the latter would have to be extended mental trauma, not just calling someone a name).

And there you go. The first needs a jury to decide if it is a true endangerment in certain conduct, the latter is pretty straightforward, and it only gets murky if you consider ones ability to self-harm being outlawed, which makes a lot of behavior illegal.

Trying to extend them to animals gets complicated, but I figure the distinction is the act of causing pain and suffering vs killing for function. IE, don't endanger or harm other animals unless for the purposes of harvesting resources from them, and only do so causing as little suffering as possible, and that you can't "harvest" an animal owned by someone else (ie, don't murder your neighbors dog saying you wanted to eat dog steaks).

How would property rights fit into this? Does vandalism cause harm to people?

Well yes, you are destroying their property. You harm others by destroying their things, both physically (it consumes time to replace them, it inconveniences them if the target of vandalism, theft, or other defamation becomes unusable, etc).

It is why I brought up pets as property, to cover animal cruelty. If someone else recognizably owns something in the legal system (via valid transaction recognized as voluntary exchange on the part of both parties) than someone else misusing that possession in any ways is grounds to cause harm to the owning party, given that the violence against property was not agreed upon (ie, the owner didn't say demolish my house in a contract).

Where is the scientific evidence that bearing a loaded firearm in public harms other people?

You would need to do a long run study on the subject to verify it is the case, but from my intuition and the number of gun misfire cases I hear about, it would probably mathematically prove to have a recognizable increase in the rate of injury due to the firearm in public if it is loaded.

Smoking in the presence of other people can harm them

And it's illegal to smoke outside of designated areas.

You can argue "harm" about anything. Especially if you include risk of harm. Under that model it would be valid to prohibit driving at any speed, owning a steak knife, etc., because there is some risk that activity poses to others.

The fundamental problem is proportionality. And the reason it's a problem is that perfect enforcement is impossible. The actual harm posed by driving down a residential street at 60MPH is not proportional to the existing penalties (i.e. reckless driving, jail time, suspension of license). You could do it a hundred times and likely nothing bad would happen. The problem is that a) if you do it 50,000 times then likely someone will be injured, and b) you can do it a hundred times and likely not be caught by law enforcement.

So here comes the trouble. If you set the penalty equal to the risk-adjusted harm (i.e. penalty for 60MPH in a residential zone is a $25 fine) then it serves as no deterrent because you'll only be caught less than 1% of the time which makes the risk-adjusted penalty 100 times less than the risk-adjusted harm. However, if you adjust the penalty to account for the low risk of getting caught, you now have a penalty which when imposed is disproportionate to the offense by a factor of 100 or more. Which is problematic when the effectiveness of enforcement increases without adjusting the penalties. And extremely problematic when the reason for enforcement ineffectiveness is that enforcement is expensive or unpopular, meaning that someone targeted for investigation (e.g. for political reasons) could be found violating many such laws in a way that wouldn't be financially or politically viable to investigate every member of the general public, and then be subject to 100X the proportional penalties for the offense(s) because the penalties were set under a set of assumptions about the effectiveness of investigation and enforcement that are invalidated when the investment of investigative resources is politically motivated.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com