Pretty much every 4+ figure civil violation, fine, etc, etc, is assessed on the basis of "what's the most we can get away with that won't have them taking us to court where it'll get knocked down or cause a public outcry if they tell the news"
I know a couple that avoided marriage so she could negotiate the childbirth bill on the basis that she was an uninsured single mom who didn't own property, etc, etc.
Until we get a SC ruling that reigns in the use of civil infractions as a revenue stream it'll continue. Most of these people being abused despite being innocent are just the rare bycatch of using police to generate revenue. You're always gonna have that bycatch because even if they have to pay out to make those people whole it's still worth it to run the system.
A Supreme Council decree would be one path to reform. State laws would be another. Even if this widely-scoped concept of sovereign immunity continues to exist, governments can always create laws to waive it.
You think the police are bad, just wait until all the other enforcers get their grubby mitts on this.
At least with the police you have rights. When the building inspector gets to rifle through the Home Depot camera records for the plate number of everyone who DIY'd an un-permitted shower renovation or the conservation commission asks Flock for every address the Sunbelt Rentals truck went you have no rights.
But just wait until anyone else comes after you. It's beyond insane how you basically have no rights when the parts of the government who aren't gun toting cops are after you (the information gleaned in the investigation thereof.
And this isn't to say the police don't violate rights left and right, they do. But at least you have a shred of hope that the courts will pay out at the end of the day. You've got none of that with the rest of the bureaucracy.
I'm not anti-regulation (well, I can be). I'm anti-enforcement or an extremist about equality under the law.
The fact that someone who gets a government paycheck and spends most of their day poking his nose in other people's business with the prospect of levying fines is the defining feature of enforcement. The fact that one may have a bullet proof vest and a gun and the other a safety vest and a clipboard doesn't change much. A government backed threat of a $10k sized problem is still a government backed thread of a $10k problem is close to the same whether you're being railroaded on a questionable DUI (pretty common scandal type) or you've run afoul of some local commissioner/inspector (health, building/zoning, conservation, etc) who's got much more nebulously worded rules/laws at their disposal.
It just boggles the mind that someone facing a $2k criminal fine has all sorts of rights but some inspector can just waltz across your property, be all "this culverts looks too new, you've violated the clean water act, that'll be a ton of money and I'm forcing you to fix it" or "you should have brought X up to modern code when you did Y, that'll be $300/day retroactively back 2yr to the date that X showed up on our records"
You have no real procedural protections from non law enforcement parts of government. They more or less make their own rules for how they operate in enforcement of whatever they're tasked with enforcing. They can use not talking to them against you, etc, etc. Your only "real" option is to plead your case to this office or person who has fairly unilateral power of enforcement and who (unlike with cops/criminal matters) is subject to scant public records or quality of evidince or sharing any of that. Like it's absolutely routine to show up at a hearing for something and then the enforcers read off correspondence, calculations, etc, etc, which you could counter but were never told existed until they're used against you. Not that cops can't do that stuff too, but there's a ton of rules to prevent that from going in their favor which the rest of the bureaucracy mostly doesn't have.
Sure you can sue them, but that'll often cost an obscene amount of money and you can't really do that until after you've been harmed. The whole system up until you get into a "real court" is working against you and more or less presumes the enforcer is correct. Furthermore, unless you sue and you get into a court there's nothing analogous to a judge or jury for these types of things. This is in stark contrast with criminal matters and "high volume" civil matters (e.g. traffic stuff) where they have to at least pay lip service to the principals of it and courts or court like things are on the "default track" for how the process works.
For a real world example, in my town the commissioner would cruise around looking for new windows, issue fines presuming you've done a bunch of renovations, and then pressure people for entry, and if they denied him he'd send them a fine presuming that the entire room was renovated and that plumbing and electrical were done without permits and of course the fine is per day until you're in compliance. And of course even if none of that was done you had to let him in to prove it and he'd nab you for anything else he could. The only "winning" move was to know that the correct answer was "it was an emergency repair GFY." He's gone now thankfully.
Speaking of Mission Accomplished and 9/11, I recently watched Tucker Carlson's 9/11 series. I was expecting garbage but it actually did an amazingly good job building off of Fahrenheit 9/11 using the stuff that's come out in the 20yr since. If you take a step back the contrast does a really does a good job illustrating how just by sprinkling bullshit into the data the state, the media, etc, can do a sufficiently good job keeping people from connecting the dots or knowing what questions they ought to be asking.
Moore knew something stunk, but he was groping around in the dark in a totally different political climate less receptive to questioning authority.
Exactly. You can do this with anything where the racket is based around the layman not being able to take in the amount of arcane subject matter info they'd need to argue their case, not just medical.
Tons of institutions that specialize in screwing people are built this way because it's pretty hard to "overtly" build an institution to screw people.
This! People underestimate the extent to which lawyers are negotiable also. “I’m not paying that” is a surprisingly effective method; they’re often willing to compromise on payment terms, work at-risk subject to a successful outcome, significantly reduce their rates, etc.
Not just arcane subject matter, but numbers so high any sane person panics.
Hospital: "Here's your bill for $1,000,000." (a figure which is 100% fictional)
Patient: <panic> "Oh shit, I don't have $1,000,000!"
Hospital: "Oh, we'll reduce it to $30,000. Aren't we nice!"
Patient: <slightly less panic> "I don't have $30,000 either, but it might not bankrupt me immediately, so I guess that'll do..."
Never mind that the same procedure in most of the EU was either "free" (to consumer at time of care) or a fraction of the cost.
In the EU you can also generally look up the cost, even in cases where the patient doesn't pay, there is a bill and fixed costs. The costs are what the government pays or what a foreigner with no medical coverage and insurance would pay. It's also generally a tiny fraction of the cost in the US.
>Your commuter car will always come equipped with the hardest all-season or summer tires the manufacturer can source
And instead of taking a step back and realizing that there are competing tradeoffs here and that a compromise needs to be made people will just screech harder about "the side of the tradeoff I care about is not being pushed hard enough by the .gov".
>The average car owner seems oblivious to the different types of tires
If the benefits were truly as categorical as the internet makes it out to be then normal people would know about it.
Normal people don't care, because the difference is incremental, not categorical. An AWD SUV on all-seasons gets you 95% of the way there with a fraction of the effort, and that's the sweet spot for normal people.
It's easier in bad weather because the ~10% of stupid people who traffic normally just kinda flows around slow it to a traffic jam that's pretty impossible to screw up too badly.
Pretty much every 4+ figure civil violation, fine, etc, etc, is assessed on the basis of "what's the most we can get away with that won't have them taking us to court where it'll get knocked down or cause a public outcry if they tell the news"
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