Comment by teddyh

> 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?