Comment by kennywinker
5 days ago
Hol’ up just a minute. You can disagree with me, but you leave dolly alone! ;)
I see what you’re saying, but I also somewhat disagree. We offload enforcement to police, which reduces friction for most but intensifies enforcement onto people deemed “suspicious” by social norms. Immigrants, black and brown people, young people, etc.
On the other side, yes if we universalize this to all laws we’d have a police state where everyone we interact with could profit off turning us in. But one of the main problems with that situation is that a ton of laws are BAD and we only are able to ignore them because for most of us they’re minimally enforced. Limit this bounty hunting business to parking enforcement and we’ve stopped the slippery slope from sliding
What makes you think that the set of people prone to snitching-for-profit don’t overlap with the set of people who would intensify enforcement on which ever group you’ve deemed people to have deemed suspicious?
Or that, at the very least, there are likely to be unintended consequences of bounty-snitching that create some other set of strained social pressures you also find unsavoury.
It’s possible that there would be unintended bad consequences. But we can try it out and course correct if that happens. Unless there is a specific bad that will definitely happen, why should we be afraid to try things?
I’ll answer my own question: we are afraid to try new things legally because gov is unresponsive. As an example, the majority of the US has supported cannabis legalization since at least 2012. If it takes a decade and counting for the law to change to follow the will of the people, trying new things risks locking in bad policy for decades / forever.
But this law’s already been passed, so if it’s bad and should be changed we’ll need proof of specific harm