That's the only way it can be in a system with thousands of crimes on the books.
People commit minor offenses, and often felonies without knowing it, on a regular basis. If surveillance was consistently used to actually enforce the laws, people would a) notice the surveillance[0] and then actually object to it and b) start objecting to all the ridiculous and poorly drafted laws they didn't even know existed.
But they don't want the majority of people objecting to things. They want a system that provides a thousand pretexts to punish anyone who does something they don't like, even something they're supposed to have a right to do, by charging them with any of the laws that everybody violates all the time and having the surveillance apparatus in place so they can do it to anyone as long as it's not done to everyone. That doesn't work if the laws are enforced consistently and the majority thereby starts insisting that they be reasonable.
I wonder if this is a technique used by certain leaders of authoritarian regimes to take out people in power they they deem threats. Everyone in the party routinely breaks laws, knowingly or otherwise. The person in charge can decide they don't like someone and start an investigation, knowing they'll eventually find something illegal. Then they can delegitimize and remove them under the guise of "corruption".
Absolutely. It's often more calculated than that though. The only way (by design) to succeed in the regime is through corruption - you're giving the leader the rope to hang you with if you ever fall out of favor.
On the other hand, those thousands of crimes on the books exist because American society operates under a norm of "if its not explicitly illegal then its fine for people to do it". See for example, the rhetoric around maximizing shareholder value.
If the only way to protect yourself from selfish people is if their actions explicitly illegal, then the logical outcome is to make more and more things explicitly illegal.
IMHO, that's one of the core failures of modern Libertarian/Objectivist influenced thought.
> If the only way to protect yourself from selfish people is if their actions explicitly illegal, then the logical outcome is to make more and more things explicitly illegal.
Except that that isn't the only way to protect yourself from selfish people and the assumption that it is is the source of a significant proportion of the dumb laws.
There is a narrow class of things that have to be prohibited by law because there is otherwise no way to prevent selfish people from doing them, like dumping industrial waste into the rivers. What these look like is causing harm to someone you're not otherwise transacting with so that they can't prevent the harm by refusing to do business with you. And then you need functional antitrust laws to ensure competitive markets.
The majority of dumb laws are laws trying to work around the fact that we don't have functional antitrust laws, or indeed have the opposite and have laws propping up incumbents and limiting competition, and therefore have many concentrated markets where companies can screw customers and workers because they have inadequate alternatives. Trying to patch that with prohibitions never works because in a concentrated market there are an unlimited number of ways the incumbents can screw you and you can't explicitly prohibit every one of them; the only thing that works is to reintroduce real competition.
The surveillance protects the regime, which mostly involves the US Federal government. Street crime, unless it’s organized by Cartels, is not a political threat.
You can see the counter example during the 40s-70s when the FBI targeted the mafia and local political corruption to take out the remaining organized crime strongholds .
Today organized crime doesn’t have much political influence. A sort of truce. So there’s no longer incentive for the feds to pursue street crime. Street crime yields no longer funnel into influence.
In fact, most political corruption today is coming from entitlements , which further bolsters political control.
And the people in power not facing the consequences of their crimes even if they come to broad light. In fact the people in charge of the surveillance is the same that hide those crimes, or convince population that there is nothing to see there.
And science already told you the best improvement ever, in the world history with regards to violent crime, came from unleaded gasoline.
So, are you using your brain and demanding other systemic changes like free mental-health care and housing? or are you just being a tool and wanting more police violence?
There's always the question of where exactly you're referring to and what kind of crime you're referring to. But I assumed that's what the parent post was referring to.
That's the only way it can be in a system with thousands of crimes on the books.
People commit minor offenses, and often felonies without knowing it, on a regular basis. If surveillance was consistently used to actually enforce the laws, people would a) notice the surveillance[0] and then actually object to it and b) start objecting to all the ridiculous and poorly drafted laws they didn't even know existed.
But they don't want the majority of people objecting to things. They want a system that provides a thousand pretexts to punish anyone who does something they don't like, even something they're supposed to have a right to do, by charging them with any of the laws that everybody violates all the time and having the surveillance apparatus in place so they can do it to anyone as long as it's not done to everyone. That doesn't work if the laws are enforced consistently and the majority thereby starts insisting that they be reasonable.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1zhe85spsw
I wonder if this is a technique used by certain leaders of authoritarian regimes to take out people in power they they deem threats. Everyone in the party routinely breaks laws, knowingly or otherwise. The person in charge can decide they don't like someone and start an investigation, knowing they'll eventually find something illegal. Then they can delegitimize and remove them under the guise of "corruption".
Absolutely. It's often more calculated than that though. The only way (by design) to succeed in the regime is through corruption - you're giving the leader the rope to hang you with if you ever fall out of favor.
Very much so: “everyone does it” means that the leader can destroy anyone who doesn’t toe the line while seeming to be following a reasonable law.
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Exactly. See also underposted speed limits, for example. It's not about being able to stop everybody, it's about being able to stop anybody.
On the other hand, those thousands of crimes on the books exist because American society operates under a norm of "if its not explicitly illegal then its fine for people to do it". See for example, the rhetoric around maximizing shareholder value.
If the only way to protect yourself from selfish people is if their actions explicitly illegal, then the logical outcome is to make more and more things explicitly illegal.
IMHO, that's one of the core failures of modern Libertarian/Objectivist influenced thought.
> If the only way to protect yourself from selfish people is if their actions explicitly illegal, then the logical outcome is to make more and more things explicitly illegal.
Except that that isn't the only way to protect yourself from selfish people and the assumption that it is is the source of a significant proportion of the dumb laws.
There is a narrow class of things that have to be prohibited by law because there is otherwise no way to prevent selfish people from doing them, like dumping industrial waste into the rivers. What these look like is causing harm to someone you're not otherwise transacting with so that they can't prevent the harm by refusing to do business with you. And then you need functional antitrust laws to ensure competitive markets.
The majority of dumb laws are laws trying to work around the fact that we don't have functional antitrust laws, or indeed have the opposite and have laws propping up incumbents and limiting competition, and therefore have many concentrated markets where companies can screw customers and workers because they have inadequate alternatives. Trying to patch that with prohibitions never works because in a concentrated market there are an unlimited number of ways the incumbents can screw you and you can't explicitly prohibit every one of them; the only thing that works is to reintroduce real competition.
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> If the only way to protect yourself from selfish people is if their actions explicitly illegal
It's not. You're asking for contract law.
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The surveillance protects the regime, which mostly involves the US Federal government. Street crime, unless it’s organized by Cartels, is not a political threat.
You can see the counter example during the 40s-70s when the FBI targeted the mafia and local political corruption to take out the remaining organized crime strongholds .
Today organized crime doesn’t have much political influence. A sort of truce. So there’s no longer incentive for the feds to pursue street crime. Street crime yields no longer funnel into influence.
In fact, most political corruption today is coming from entitlements , which further bolsters political control.
And the people in power not facing the consequences of their crimes even if they come to broad light. In fact the people in charge of the surveillance is the same that hide those crimes, or convince population that there is nothing to see there.
The rampant crime is largely made up.
Compared to other major western countries, the US has a serious problem with violent crime in particular.
If you remove like 250sq mi of land from that stat you can cut the violent crime stat by 90%.
There are some neighborhoods with more murders in a month than some whole states see in a couple years.
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And science already told you the best improvement ever, in the world history with regards to violent crime, came from unleaded gasoline.
So, are you using your brain and demanding other systemic changes like free mental-health care and housing? or are you just being a tool and wanting more police violence?
And quality of life crimes. In my country, I can get a package left on my property and it is not stolen.
What are you basing this claim on?
https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2024-06-1...
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2025/11/19/gallup-crime-p...
There's always the question of where exactly you're referring to and what kind of crime you're referring to. But I assumed that's what the parent post was referring to.
Really? Rampant white collar crime is made up?
Who’s making up the homicide and other violent crime statistics and for what purpose?
Which statistics are you looking at? Crime has been dropping since the 90s, with the exception of short term regressions.
https://jasher.substack.com/p/crime-is-likely-down-an-enormo...
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What statistics? These?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#/me...
https://ncvs.bjs.ojp.gov/year-to-year-comparison/crimeType
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How do the stats look compared to 5, 10, 20, 40 years ago?
...because the point of surveillance was never to solve crime.