That's the only way it can be in a system with thousands of crimes on the books.

People commit minor offenses, and often felonies without knowing it, on a regular basis. If surveillance was consistently used to actually enforce the laws, people would a) notice the surveillance[0] and then actually object to it and b) start objecting to all the ridiculous and poorly drafted laws they didn't even know existed.

But they don't want the majority of people objecting to things. They want a system that provides a thousand pretexts to punish anyone who does something they don't like, even something they're supposed to have a right to do, by charging them with any of the laws that everybody violates all the time and having the surveillance apparatus in place so they can do it to anyone as long as it's not done to everyone. That doesn't work if the laws are enforced consistently and the majority thereby starts insisting that they be reasonable.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1zhe85spsw

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joebates 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I wonder if this is a technique used by certain leaders of authoritarian regimes to take out people in power they they deem threats. Everyone in the party routinely breaks laws, knowingly or otherwise. The person in charge can decide they don't like someone and start an investigation, knowing they'll eventually find something illegal. Then they can delegitimize and remove them under the guise of "corruption".

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antod 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Absolutely. It's often more calculated than that though. The only way (by design) to succeed in the regime is through corruption - you're giving the leader the rope to hang you with if you ever fall out of favor.

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acdha 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Very much so: “everyone does it” means that the leader can destroy anyone who doesn’t toe the line while seeming to be following a reasonable law.

	▲	generic92034 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		And only a few steps further and the leader rarely needs to employ the service of obedient judges, but opponents "just" fall out of windows.

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CamperBob2 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Exactly. See also underposted speed limits, for example. It's not about being able to stop everybody, it's about being able to stop anybody.

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harimau777 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

On the other hand, those thousands of crimes on the books exist because American society operates under a norm of "if its not explicitly illegal then its fine for people to do it". See for example, the rhetoric around maximizing shareholder value.

If the only way to protect yourself from selfish people is if their actions explicitly illegal, then the logical outcome is to make more and more things explicitly illegal.

IMHO, that's one of the core failures of modern Libertarian/Objectivist influenced thought.

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AnthonyMouse 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> If the only way to protect yourself from selfish people is if their actions explicitly illegal, then the logical outcome is to make more and more things explicitly illegal.

Except that that isn't the only way to protect yourself from selfish people and the assumption that it is is the source of a significant proportion of the dumb laws.

There is a narrow class of things that have to be prohibited by law because there is otherwise no way to prevent selfish people from doing them, like dumping industrial waste into the rivers. What these look like is causing harm to someone you're not otherwise transacting with so that they can't prevent the harm by refusing to do business with you. And then you need functional antitrust laws to ensure competitive markets.

The majority of dumb laws are laws trying to work around the fact that we don't have functional antitrust laws, or indeed have the opposite and have laws propping up incumbents and limiting competition, and therefore have many concentrated markets where companies can screw customers and workers because they have inadequate alternatives. Trying to patch that with prohibitions never works because in a concentrated market there are an unlimited number of ways the incumbents can screw you and you can't explicitly prohibit every one of them; the only thing that works is to reintroduce real competition.

	▲	iamnothere 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I will add this: the number of ways in which humans can harm one another is immeasurable, and every law comes with an associated cost. At the bare minimum the cost is enforcement plus the harm imposed by occasional false accusations and convictions. But bad laws can also dampen legitimate economic activity, making social problems worse. As a society plunges into dysfunction due to economic stress, the number of people harming one another increases. If the society responds using more laws, and fails to correct the source of the dysfunction, it will eventually collapse under the weight of those laws as enforcement becomes uneven and politically driven. (This is the failure mode of legalist and bureaucratic states.) Alternatively, if the society responds with a more arbitrary case-by-case system of punishment, it will collapse into mob rule or dictatorship, so lack of structured law isn’t a solution either. The only real solution is to fix the root problems facing the society. Antitrust helps with this because it can “unstick” parasitic incumbents who are preventing the market from dynamically responding to real economic conditions.

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JumpCrisscross 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> If the only way to protect yourself from selfish people is if their actions explicitly illegal

It's not. You're asking for contract law.