> they're not "laws" just "rules" that the government will come after you if you break

If you break a rule you get fined. If you break a law you can go to jail. (Congress can delegate regulation around crimes to an agency, but the crime generally has to be substantially described by statute.)

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cucumber3732842 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

>If you break a rule you get fined. If you break a law you can go to jail

That's a distinction without a difference when talking about the kinds of ruinous fines government agencies levy and how equivalently ruinous lawyering up to fight them is.

Most people receiving these fines happily spend a month in prison for six figures because six figures is years of discretionary income to most people.

	▲	JumpCrisscross 20 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> That's a distinction without a difference Criminal versus civil is a distinction with massive difference. > Most people receiving these fines happily spend a month in prison for six figures Most civil monetary penalties are for reporting and filing violations to the FEC, HHS or FinCEN; submitting false information in a Medicare/Medicaid claim [1], grant, contract or bid; or violating consumer protection, employer, OSHA, environmental or patient care laws. The “you” is probably a corporation. And I’m not sure anyone would rationally escalate a fine for e.g. submitting a contract bid with outdated information into a criminal conviction. [1] https://oig.hhs.gov/fraud/enforcement/types-of-civil-monetar...:

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mothballed 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'd like to see someone explain why a .50 BMG bolt action upper receiver (AR-15 type) is a firearm but a .556 bolt action upper receiver (AR-15 type) is not. It's literally the same damn thing but with a different sized cartridge. Nothing in the statute would allow this, yet executive 'delegation' mumbo-jumbo and magically one is basically unregulated and the other is felonies out the ass if you start commercially selling them without a host of licensing and checks.

The truth is the rulemaking and delegation stuff has strayed so far from the legal fiction as to be almost completely unrecognizable from the thin veil authorizing it.

	▲	JumpCrisscross 13 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> I'd like to see someone explain why a .50 BMG bolt action upper receiver (AR-15 type) is a firearm but a .556 bolt action upper receiver (AR-15 type) is not Have you petitioned to have the rule revisited? I’d imagine this is the right political climate in which to do it. We have an overreaching regulatory state. I agree with you on that. But trying to ram everything through the Congress just means we get a President who is a king, because the complexity of administering a large, modern economy is simply not one that can be centrally deliberated in the way legislative bodies work.