Earlier quoted context omitted.
>[P]eople might want to keep a bad law if they continue to make money by snitching. In fact, money is the exact wrong incentive for this sort of thing. I've said elsewhere the optimal mechanism here is for that money to be paid to the snitcher, from the person who is being turned in. This would lead us to assume that for most crimes of a personal nature, we would have about as many people losing money due to the law…
>I've said elsewhere the optimal mechanism here is for that money to be paid to the snitcher, from the person who is being turned in. In some cases, which seem like a good idea like corporate malfeasance whistleblowers or government grift whistleblowers. This is because the people paid by our tax dollars would be at a disadvantage compared to an insider in the company. In others, you could see the direction it must g…
Conversely, under an enforcement regime where everyone is genuinely scared to go higher than 65, the worst case scenario is... Everyone does 65. Fewer accidents, and fewer fatalities from those accidents. Best case scenario is they rapidly revise up to 70 - 75 - wherever.
Re/ "imagine that a bad law could effect a relatively small group much more than others", I think we would have to define more closely what a 'bad law' actually is to answer that first. Under this kind of fine-based regime, it would have to be something that targets a small group, unfairly, and manages to consistently extract a lot of money from them, which requires they have a lot of money to reliably extract in the first place - otherwise it stops being worth the effort to target them specifically.
I guess you could imagine making lottery scratch tickets a fineable offense, and thereby target pensioners unfairly. That's the closest I got after 5 minutes of thinking about it.
Re/ using money to incentivize public action - we have clashing moral intuitions on this, I definitely don't see it as a last resort. In fact I would far prefer it to be the first resort. Money is a much more efficient, scalable, precise, and robust way of handling things than e.g. sending people to prison (which we still have to pay for, by the way, prisons aren't cheap).
Re/ the idler's law itself - You're allowed to be against it personally, that's fine. The people of New York City voted in favor of it, and they probably have good reasons for this that mostly only make sense to themselves. Personally, I've been to New York, and seen how cramped those streets are. It doesn't surprise me that some schmuck holding up half of 6th Avenue should be made to pay for it - they are likely causing thousands of dollars of cash flow loss per second because on who's late for work because of them. But even then, I don't live there. I don't actually have a good sense of this kind of thing. I defer to the wisdom of the locals here. Do as the Romans do.