From what I hear, most of us don't follow either the letter or the spirit. A former project manager of mine had previously worked as a cop, and I asked him how he determined who to arrest — if I remember right (it was a while ago now), the answer was approximately "if they look sus, arrest first and figure out the exact offence later". What's the quote? Something along the lines of "as a kid I thought adults had it all figured out, then I became an adult and realised none of us know anything and we're all bluffing all the time"?
The reason we're not all in jail all the time is that we don't fully enforce almost any law, IMO because we all like to think of ourselves and most of our peers as the "goodies" even as we demand ever stronger crackdowns on ever broader ranges of behaviour. And also we don't like living in police states run by people who tell us we're actually all bastards.
Fully enforce road laws? The only people who won't lose their licences, will be people who aren't driving.
Littering? The fines would probably raise enough money to replace all taxation and then some.
Drug laws? In the UK, heroin users alone are a group nearly three times the size of the prison population, all class-A drugs combined are about 11x the UK prison population, all drugs of all categories are about 31x the prison population — and that's "this year" not "lifetime use" which matters given the length of the prison sentences for different categories: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeand...
Copyright infringement? Imagine if Google (or AltaVista) had been hit by the same sort of lawsuits sent against individuals engaged in P2P file sharing during the Wild West era of the internet.
Personal data protection? Even before GDPR, websites should've been asking for permission for tracking cookies.
