Re:10% of households pay more than 80% of taxes on alcohol a...
by nostrademons on Tuesday October 26, 2021 @02:59PM
(#29004709)
So I'll start with how it's supposed to work and then acknowledge that it's oftentimes not how it does work in practice.
Ideally, you're supposed to avoid high court fees & fines by not doing criminal things. Avoid the court system and you will never have to pay court fees. And if you do end up with a $50K judgment, you're supposed to go work productively and convince someone to pay you $50K for work that's worth more to them than $50K. Thus you have paid your debt to society - you did something bad, but if you do other good things that people find valuable, that debt is wiped out. In theory at least, someone with $50K in his pocket got it by doing things that a lot of people found valuable, enough that they were willing to pay $50K for it.
Now, I know it doesn't always work that way. Someone could find themselves in the court system not because they did something bad, but because they're black and were standing on the wrong street corner. We shouldn't do that. And sometimes whole behaviors that are normal in one disadvantaged culture (smoking weed, for example) get criminalized precisely because the person in power wants to jail lots of people. The person who did that should've been put in jail himself, but Gerald Ford pardoned him. This is also contingent upon people having money because they did things of value that other people found worthwhile enough to pay them for, which also isn't a given today. We should fix that too, although I think that a lot of people's reaction against wealth is because they can't wrap their heads around how many people a billion users is or how much value they derive from everyday activities provided by a large corporation.
But assuming that things are broken but we're going to slap a band-aid on the one specific instance that's in front of us today risks entrenching the brokenness. Say that you do create lower fees and fines for poorer people. Aren't you now incentivizing criminal behavior, as the costs for it are less? And won't those societal costs be born primarily by the people around them, who are usually other poor people that now have to live with the consequences?
Ideally, you're supposed to avoid high court fees & fines by not doing criminal things. Avoid the court system and you will never have to pay court fees. And if you do end up with a $50K judgment, you're supposed to go work productively and convince someone to pay you $50K for work that's worth more to them than $50K. Thus you have paid your debt to society - you did something bad, but if you do other good things that people find valuable, that debt is wiped out. In theory at least, someone with $50K in his pocket got it by doing things that a lot of people found valuable, enough that they were willing to pay $50K for it.
Now, I know it doesn't always work that way. Someone could find themselves in the court system not because they did something bad, but because they're black and were standing on the wrong street corner. We shouldn't do that. And sometimes whole behaviors that are normal in one disadvantaged culture (smoking weed, for example) get criminalized precisely because the person in power wants to jail lots of people. The person who did that should've been put in jail himself, but Gerald Ford pardoned him. This is also contingent upon people having money because they did things of value that other people found worthwhile enough to pay them for, which also isn't a given today. We should fix that too, although I think that a lot of people's reaction against wealth is because they can't wrap their heads around how many people a billion users is or how much value they derive from everyday activities provided by a large corporation.
But assuming that things are broken but we're going to slap a band-aid on the one specific instance that's in front of us today risks entrenching the brokenness. Say that you do create lower fees and fines for poorer people. Aren't you now incentivizing criminal behavior, as the costs for it are less? And won't those societal costs be born primarily by the people around them, who are usually other poor people that now have to live with the consequences?