E.g zoning rules, HOA rules, building codes. The proposition is that most such absolute/categorical rules should be subject to anyone paying for a variance, and the cost of such variance should not exceed a pessimistic estimate of the negative externalities thereof.
My current credence for this is 75% and this resolves to my credence at closing time.
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Trying to apply tribal justice to a global society is as bad idea as trying to apply tribal economics. It's one thing when someone kills their cousin and their great uncle taxes them to make sure the victim's family is taken care of. It's a different situation when someone walks into a school and kills 20 children they don't know and every parent in the country wants them dead.
One problem is scale and the other is a functional deficiency. Most people commit crimes because the price of the alternative is either inconvenient or restrictive. Your thought experiment falls apart the minute someone can't afford to pay the tax. Then you need a whole other set of systems to handle the overflow and keep your society from falling apart.
@marnet There would have to be at least debtor’s prisons or penal transportation for people who can’t afford to pay the fine for the crime they committed. But if someone with an average 60k/yr income and some savings commits a minor crime resulting in a sentence of a couple years in jail, it’s a Pareto improvement for everyone involved if they have the option to pay a 60k fine instead of going to jail and earning $0 for 2 years plus costing the taxpayer $60k
When the negative utility of committing X crime doesn’t scale with the income of the offender, the fine probably shouldn’t either.
@JonathanRay Like I said, "a whole other set of systems". Now you need prisons or at least indentured servitude until a person incurs a tax debt that’s greater than anything they will earn in their lifetime. Then what?
I think the answer is they join a criminal syndicate. This is a crime for money scheme and criminal syndicates are already optimized for criminal monetary gain. Your system eliminates turnover and kicks recruitment into overdrive. Criminal syndicates will offer the best crime insurance. As long as a criminal earns some percentage more than they get caught their crime sprees can continue, uninterrupted. And, lets face it, this system isn’t going to eliminate blackmail, coercion or bribery and criminal syndicates are already very good at this. The net result of your thought experiment, I think, is that criminal syndicates become the dominant political and economic force in your society.
Just wait until the criminal syndicates go to war after every citizen of your society joins a faction for "protection" and the only path to greater profits is consolidation.
@marnet This all depends on the size of the fine for participating in a criminal syndicate
@NicholasKross this has been done before (weregeld)
It has the advantage of avoiding expensive prisons that reduce the productivity of the inmates.
@NicholasKross All regulations as well as criminal laws are considered for purposes of this question.