Today a big fraction of “constitutional law” issues are on our many awkward, incoherent, and inefficient collective choices regarding crime detection, punishment, co-liability, and freedoms of movement and privacy. My
It is not insurance, but having worked with math models of such situations, my intuition is that the optimum will be close to having these equal, the difference being due to one or more elasticities near one.
The root of my confusion, I think, is that I'm not sure if your scheme is an insurance scheme. If it was, then aggregate cost for plaintiffs must equal aggregate damage, for plaintiffs simply mutualise expected harm.
But that's not what fines/reparations are about : it's about innocent humans being attacked by (perhaps malignant) actors, eg. getting mugged or killed; and about having the malignant party pay for the damage.
So we shouldn't expect in general for the "subscription to law" fees to equal fines, I think. We'd want fines to be a lot more expensive than self-fine-setting, to actively discourage harm.
Robin, I don't understand where you intuition that the total of fines paid for insults should be near the total costs for plaintiffs to set their personal rates comes from. You even suggest that we could set them to be equal.
Does it stem from the fact that you consider insults to be trivial and thus that jerks that don't want to be insulted should on average have to pay as much as those who insult them ?
Or rather is there some general mechanism that has these two quantities converge for all harms ? That would seem wrong : you wouldn't expect total fines for murders to equal the aggregate premium everyone would have to pay to specify that they don't want to be murdered I guess?
I think society is used to there being things that money can't buy. Multiple wives, slaves, votes, drugs and sex spring to mind. Get out of jail cards are currently just another item on this list.
Interesting proposal,do you think we can use futarchy to determine the ratio between annual fee & fine level, where the metric is the absolute difference between fees paid by victim vs perpetrator?
I don't see how it's meaner than taking all their money.
Anyway, I don't see anyone proposing that rich people not be allowed to buy anything, only that they not be allowed to buy the right to have people "super punished" i.e. locked up forever or executed or something for unauthorised picking a favoutite rose from their front yard, or things of that nature.
Maybe the rich dude has some sentimental attachment to their roses, and I can see why the punishment might be better if it was specific to the harm done, but whenever some people have 3 or 5 orders of magnitude more financial resources than others, and they can set punishment levels, you're going to get some outcomes that appear strange to most people. I don't see how it would be accepted.
What if you set the "prices" in terms of hours of community work. So you do some community work and people get punished in proportion.
That doesn't seem to be a problem (or if it is, it is better solved by other intricacies of this system that haven't been determined yet). If you wanted to fine truckers who honk outside your window, you'd need to pay a fee proportionate to the fine the truckers will pay. So for 'crimes' like that, you'll be expending a pretty big amount of money just to deter honking.That does have strange implications on property rights, though...
Somebody could temporarily raise the injury fine for some specific crime they expect to be hit by, and only pay the high fee for a couple hours. Is that a problem? It might lead to an fees market and fee day-traders etc.
Choice of fees either needs to be fixed over a reasonable time period (inefficient), or fees need to rise and fall with risk of the crime being committed to you (which carries moral hazard and is very hard to estimate).
Hah! This is a problem for adoption of your proposals, though. You are proposing human rights reforms that seem to favor rich people - compared to the current status quo. Economics has a bit of a history of proposing reforms that favor the rich. For example, taxing the rich and giving to the poor is apparently not "economically efficient" - because it makes some people worse off. Rich people's economics, IOW.
If this is a plan that transparently favors the rich, how will it get dressed up so that it appeals to (mostly poor) voters? Will they be offered extra cash at the same time - in exchange for their rights? Or is the plan to implement the system in oligarchies first, where the rights of the poor are less of a concern?
Lastly, I'm not sure an RFID will be good enough. Then you can fake being an important person by copying their ID. You probably need asymmetric cryptography, or similar. It likely means using a chip.
Allowing people to be rich, instead of taking away all of their wealth, favors the rich by default. Letting the rich keep their money but not buy stuff of value to them with it is just mean.
Like many of your other CJ proposals, this one ditches the egalitarian idea that everyone is equal in the eyes of the law, and proposes a system where the rich can pay for privileges. In a democracy, voters might not go for such systems.
You usually explain that we can subsidize the poor if we are sympathetic to their plight. I think you usually favor cash transfers, rather than paternalistically giving rights and privileges. However, should there be some "basic human rights" package financed by the government? How can these CJ proposals avoid being seen as favoring the rich by default?
The big trouble with this proposal is that it requires us to start with a consensus on what constitute real crimes -- and that already doesn't exist. One party pretends that looting, pillaging, and burning by their side never happened and were peaceful demonstrations (or alternatively that violent crime by minority groups is a civil right) -- while real peaceful demonstrations by their opponents get infiltrated, false flagged, and smeared as an "insurrection" complete with a kangaroo court in Congress and a crowd of witch-hunters following behind them. And since they own the media, the idiots who still trust TV news will never learn better even if their side loses power again.
It is simply stupid to continue to assume good faith on the part of opponents such as I've described. That is why democracy is over. Leaders like Trudeau will act as Tsars and get away with it, or lose. Politics may as well be discussed on all fours now.
Thank you. Do you share the spreadsheets of these models ?I'd be interested in getting a feel of how these optimums happen.
With a wink to https://www.econlib.org/no-... :)
It is not insurance, but having worked with math models of such situations, my intuition is that the optimum will be close to having these equal, the difference being due to one or more elasticities near one.
The root of my confusion, I think, is that I'm not sure if your scheme is an insurance scheme. If it was, then aggregate cost for plaintiffs must equal aggregate damage, for plaintiffs simply mutualise expected harm.
But that's not what fines/reparations are about : it's about innocent humans being attacked by (perhaps malignant) actors, eg. getting mugged or killed; and about having the malignant party pay for the damage.
So we shouldn't expect in general for the "subscription to law" fees to equal fines, I think. We'd want fines to be a lot more expensive than self-fine-setting, to actively discourage harm.
Robin, I don't understand where you intuition that the total of fines paid for insults should be near the total costs for plaintiffs to set their personal rates comes from. You even suggest that we could set them to be equal.
Does it stem from the fact that you consider insults to be trivial and thus that jerks that don't want to be insulted should on average have to pay as much as those who insult them ?
Or rather is there some general mechanism that has these two quantities converge for all harms ? That would seem wrong : you wouldn't expect total fines for murders to equal the aggregate premium everyone would have to pay to specify that they don't want to be murdered I guess?
Many mechanisms would probably work acceptably well.
I think society is used to there being things that money can't buy. Multiple wives, slaves, votes, drugs and sex spring to mind. Get out of jail cards are currently just another item on this list.
Interesting proposal,do you think we can use futarchy to determine the ratio between annual fee & fine level, where the metric is the absolute difference between fees paid by victim vs perpetrator?
I don't see how it's meaner than taking all their money.
Anyway, I don't see anyone proposing that rich people not be allowed to buy anything, only that they not be allowed to buy the right to have people "super punished" i.e. locked up forever or executed or something for unauthorised picking a favoutite rose from their front yard, or things of that nature.
Maybe the rich dude has some sentimental attachment to their roses, and I can see why the punishment might be better if it was specific to the harm done, but whenever some people have 3 or 5 orders of magnitude more financial resources than others, and they can set punishment levels, you're going to get some outcomes that appear strange to most people. I don't see how it would be accepted.
What if you set the "prices" in terms of hours of community work. So you do some community work and people get punished in proportion.
Yes, setting fines should be done well in advance of having info on particular harms being especially likely to happen.
That doesn't seem to be a problem (or if it is, it is better solved by other intricacies of this system that haven't been determined yet). If you wanted to fine truckers who honk outside your window, you'd need to pay a fee proportionate to the fine the truckers will pay. So for 'crimes' like that, you'll be expending a pretty big amount of money just to deter honking.That does have strange implications on property rights, though...
Somebody could temporarily raise the injury fine for some specific crime they expect to be hit by, and only pay the high fee for a couple hours. Is that a problem? It might lead to an fees market and fee day-traders etc.
Choice of fees either needs to be fixed over a reasonable time period (inefficient), or fees need to rise and fall with risk of the crime being committed to you (which carries moral hazard and is very hard to estimate).
Hah! This is a problem for adoption of your proposals, though. You are proposing human rights reforms that seem to favor rich people - compared to the current status quo. Economics has a bit of a history of proposing reforms that favor the rich. For example, taxing the rich and giving to the poor is apparently not "economically efficient" - because it makes some people worse off. Rich people's economics, IOW.
If this is a plan that transparently favors the rich, how will it get dressed up so that it appeals to (mostly poor) voters? Will they be offered extra cash at the same time - in exchange for their rights? Or is the plan to implement the system in oligarchies first, where the rights of the poor are less of a concern?
Lastly, I'm not sure an RFID will be good enough. Then you can fake being an important person by copying their ID. You probably need asymmetric cryptography, or similar. It likely means using a chip.
Allowing people to be rich, instead of taking away all of their wealth, favors the rich by default. Letting the rich keep their money but not buy stuff of value to them with it is just mean.
Like many of your other CJ proposals, this one ditches the egalitarian idea that everyone is equal in the eyes of the law, and proposes a system where the rich can pay for privileges. In a democracy, voters might not go for such systems.
You usually explain that we can subsidize the poor if we are sympathetic to their plight. I think you usually favor cash transfers, rather than paternalistically giving rights and privileges. However, should there be some "basic human rights" package financed by the government? How can these CJ proposals avoid being seen as favoring the rich by default?
The big trouble with this proposal is that it requires us to start with a consensus on what constitute real crimes -- and that already doesn't exist. One party pretends that looting, pillaging, and burning by their side never happened and were peaceful demonstrations (or alternatively that violent crime by minority groups is a civil right) -- while real peaceful demonstrations by their opponents get infiltrated, false flagged, and smeared as an "insurrection" complete with a kangaroo court in Congress and a crowd of witch-hunters following behind them. And since they own the media, the idiots who still trust TV news will never learn better even if their side loses power again.
It is simply stupid to continue to assume good faith on the part of opponents such as I've described. That is why democracy is over. Leaders like Trudeau will act as Tsars and get away with it, or lose. Politics may as well be discussed on all fours now.