On the fence on this one, because it seems unfair to punish someone more just because they're doing well, for essentially the same crime. But... there was a drug dealer in our block of flats once who had so much cash he'd park his BMW outside the door on double-yellows, and he'd just pay the £50 fine several times a week, just to save him a 3 minute walk to the car park... so, perhaps a system of increasingly punishing repeat offenders maybe?
Another way to think is that you are not punishing them more, you are punishing them equally if you do it by % of "richness" Meaning that if a fine means that someone struggles to eat the last 2 days of the month, that should apply to everyone, no matter how much you make, it just happens that you have to take away more from the ones that have more to get the same effect. It also makes that those that are not soo well off are not disproportionally punished.
Lets make a imaginary extrapolation to see it in other light, lets say that there where a second human like species here on earth, but they live until around 1000 years instead of 100 but they experience time 10 times quicker, so for them 10 years feel like 1 year to us.
Would it be fair to do the same time in prison for them than us for the same crime? what feels psychologically like 10 years and 10% of our lives would feel to them like 1 year psychologically and will be only 1% of their lives, and if we started to put harsher penalties to account for them, they still will end up with kinda light sentences and normal humans would end up with absurdly high sentences.
If the idea is to punish so it is not done again, sentences have to be proportional to the one receiving the sentence to be effective if not you are over-punishing some are under-punishing others.
OFC this is with the idea that fines are punishments and not just paying for what you broke kind of deal, for example if it is a fine for parking in a place with a parking meter without paying, the fine should be what you did not pay plus a little bit extra.
> On the fence on this one, because it seems unfair to punish someone more because they're doing well
You're not punishing them more, you're punishing them similarly: the marginal value of money diminishes as you have more of it, a $20 fine to someone who earns $5000 a week is a lot less punishing than to someone who earns $500. By scaling fines to income / wealth, you're preserving the fact that this is supposed to be a punishment deterring from the act.
> so, perhaps a system of increasingly punishing repeat offenders maybe?
That's... already common? But if you have enough money, it would have to scale up quickly and drastically to have any deterrent effect, and it would still disproportionally affect lower-income individuals.
An alternative (or complement) is to create a flat resource, that's what points systems do (although they tend to still disproportionally affect lower-income individual: they're harder hit by the loss of mobility, and they may not have the time or money to attend to recovery courses when those are available).
> although they tend to still disproportionally affect lower-income individual
Any fair punishment will disproportionally impact lower-income individuals, since resources confer resilience and resilience resists punishment. If your goal is equal impact, you have to have unfair punishments, because you have to scale your punishment to the target’s resources.
If you want to punish someone equally with fines, you need to fine rich people a higher proportion of their wealth and income, not even just the same percent.
I'm not swimming in money but I earn well above average, and because I do my disposable income is a higher multiple of the average persons disposable income than my income is. To be fined even, say, a few days income for me is at most a minor nuisance. Maybe I'll feel bad enough to eat out at restaurants less that month. Maybe. To be fined 1 days income for someone low paid might mean they'll struggle to cover their bills or eat.
There's nothing equal about even a fixed proportion of income for that reasn. But it's significantly better than a fixed amount that doesn't take income into account at all.
If you truly want to punish people financially the same in the sense of making it hurt the same for the same transgression, you'd have to fine people earning above average not just a higher amount, but a significantly higher percentage of their earnings and wealth.
EDIT: I'm reminded of Marx discussion in Critique of the Gotha Program of the first proposed program for what became the German SPD of the use of the term "equal rights" which, after tearing the term aparts ends with "To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal." That is, if you want equal outcomes, you can't treat people the same, because their situations are not the same.
Same theory in the UK (12 points on your license is a ban) but we have something like 11k drivers driving around on 12 or more points because they claim "not driving would be exceptional hardship".
Yeah that's the same here, not sure if it's the case for parking fines though. It differs county by county, and private parking providers each have their own sets of rules I guess
That's a pretty bold move for a drug dealer. I imagine they'd try and keep low profile to not invite a knock on the door. I guess things are different in Europe :)
Maybe we should just do away with fines and make everyone do same amount of slave labour. So instead a fine, you would spend x number of days doing some labour.
This does not solve anything. Poor would then mean "people with shorter life spans (older, sick)", and rich would mean "people with longer life spans (young, healthy)". That would mean that a morbidly obese, smoking guy would need to spend less days doing labour than some middle class guy who isn't even close to his retirement and puts priority on his health. So we would effectively punish the healthy.
People should just stop thinking about global policies, because it's a road to hell.
But why is it more fair to punish someone more because they're poor? Matching the fine to income/wealth is the best way to ensure the impact to the recipient of the fine is similar, regardless of personal wealth. A poor repeat offender may be bankrupted after just a handful of fines. A rich repeat offdner may be able to continue doing it hundreds of times afterwards without much issue.
If you dispense the same punishment to two individuals and one is less able to withstand that punishment, are you punishing that person more? I’m not sure that the answer is a simple “yes”.
For one, this would mean if you gave someone a 50% discount on their parking fine because they were poor, but it turned out they actually only had 25% of the assets of the rich person, you are still unfairly punishing the poor person more than the rich person. It can’t be correct that an observer has to know the financial status of every citizen to judge whether their government is being fair or not.
