The problem here is that we keep acting like the way we should solve this is by having people making toy projects or general purpose tools cower in fear of their own government and stop trying to make anything, instead of establishing a government that can distinguish between violent drug cartels and child abusers vs. innocent behavior or minor offenses and then not inflict senseless damage on the latter.
Government is incentivized and rewarded for finding and punishing violent drug cartels and child abusers. When those become hard to find, the government punishes minor offenses, since it is easy to paint these as hardened criminals, and nobody is in a real position to discover or publicize the actual state of things.
It's more along the lines of, people hear "money laundering" and think this implies some kind of drug ring or terrorism, when it's really some laws so expansive and nebulous that ordinary people frequently do it without knowing, so now there are laws on the books that allow random normies to be charged with a felony at the discretion of the prosecutor.
And these laws tend to take a very specific form: They're laws against things adjacent to other crimes, instead of laws against the original crimes themselves. So this is like, the CFAA putting felony penalties on "unauthorized access" when the implication justifying the penalty is "unauthorized access in order to commit a crime like credit card fraud" and the solution is to put those penalties on the actual fraud. Or "money laundering" which implies an underlying crime to be laundering the proceeds of which implies that it's redundant and they should instead be charged with the underlying crime.
Because what those laws erroneously allow is for someone to be charged with the secondary offense without ever establishing the primary one, or substituting a minor primary offense even though the penalties for the secondary offense were set under the assumption it was a major one. Which is how ordinary people get ensnared.
But we don't need those laws at all because you can charge the actual criminals with their actual crimes, so they should just be repealed, or converted into minor misdemeanors with the heavy penalties instead being imposed on the associated serious crime and only when it actually exists.
Some “adjacent” crimes like that exist because enforcement and/or detection of the original crime is hard and/or expensive. Like gun laws. Or curfew.
I still think that the real problem is the incentives of government; the problem you describe exist simply because government also has the power to create new laws in order to make life easier for itself, at the expense of the governed. I.e. the problem is government prioritizing being seen as useful over actually being useful.
> Some “adjacent” crimes like that exist because enforcement and/or detection of the original crime is hard and/or expensive. Like gun laws. Or curfew.
So we have to do the hard and/or expensive thing instead. It's the government, they spend six trillion dollars a year, "not expensive" is clearly not a thing we're currently receiving as a benefit of the status quo.
In general these laws will be making things more expensive, because investigations, prosecutions and incarceration of people convicted of adjacent crimes but not primary crimes all cost a ton of money for negligible if not overtly negative outcomes. When you throw minor offenders in prison you have to pay to prosecute and incarcerate them and lose the benefits of their contributions to society if they hadn't been incarcerated. It's just setting money on fire, except that in this case (as in many other cases) "money" is really "lives".
> I still think that the real problem is the incentives of government; the problem you describe exist simply because government also has the power to create new laws in order to make life easier for itself, at the expense of the governed. I.e. the problem is government prioritizing being seen as useful over actually being useful.
This isn't really a different problem, it's just asking the question in the form of, given that these laws are stupid how do we bring about a system that doesn't have them and can't pass them anymore?
