Nuxx:C9f9ead6-0b8c-48ae-91c3-27b3a98c752b@y7g2000yqa.googlegroups.com

Path: number1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!border2.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!postnews.google.com!y7g2000yqa.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail Message-ID:  From: Nuxx Bar  Newsgroups: uk.rec.cycling,uk.transport,uk.rec.driving Subject: Good Laws v Bad Laws Date: Sat, 4 Apr 2009 16:03:12 -0700 (PDT) Lines: 56 Organization: http://groups.google.com NNTP-Posting-Host: 81.156.251.147 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: posting.google.com 1238886192 16086 127.0.0.1 (4 Apr 2009 23:03:12 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 4 Apr 2009 23:03:12 +0000 (UTC) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: y7g2000yqa.googlegroups.com; posting-host=81.156.251.147; posting-account=7_6kYAkAAABD6HrjM0VxehwvZOKMxm4g User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-GB; rv:1.9.0.8) Gecko/2009032609 Firefox/3.0.8 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729),gzip(gfe),gzip(gfe) Bytes: 4586 Xref: perfectly-safe.chapmancentral.co.uk uk.rec.cycling:693281

A good law is one which, if every violation resulted in a conviction, would benefit society. Examples of such laws include those against murder, rape, burglary, assault, shoplifting, driving without insurance...most laws in fact. Wouldn't it be great if every scumbag who ever murdered or raped anyone got punished appropriately?

A bad law is one which, if every violation resulted in a conviction, would make society worse. Examples of such laws include speed limits (at least with digital, discretionless, robotic enforcement) and the law against the possession of cannabis. If every speeding violation resulted in a conviction, the vast majority of active motorists would be banned within a week, and everyone knows that really (though some like to lie about it, because they find it inconvenient). Although the extremist motorist-hating nutters may think that a good thing, no reasonable, sane person would.

Similarly, if cannabis users were convicted every time they used cannabis, they would mostly be in jail for a victimless, non-violent "crime", completely unnecessarily, and to society's cost (not to mention their own). And if every cannabis user who passed a joint to a friend was convicted of dealing, this effect would be magnified.

We need good laws, and we need sensible, discretionary enforcement. Discretionless enforcement of speed limits (especially those which are usually too low for the conditions) is absurd, and the only reason why it doesn't lead to the breakdown of society is because it's done randomly and only against a very small percentage of speeding violations (which doesn't for a minute make it "OK"). Any law (or application of it) which is like that, where it only doesn't screw things up completely because it's not done too much, is not fit for our country.

And this, motorist-haters, is why the government doesn't take up your suggestions of "putting hidden speed cameras in every hedge": as fellow motorist-haters they'd love to, but they know damn well that it would mess things up something chronic, and so they make sure that the damage that robotic speed enforcement causes is limited by limiting its prevalence. But we shouldn't have *any* amount of enforcement like that: the only enforcement which is worthwhile is that where the benefit to society is proportional, not inversely proportional, to the percentage of violations which result in convictions.

Let's have laws which we're proud to enforce, not ones which we "mustn't enforce too much". Let's have laws against behaviours which we actually need and want to stamp out, not behaviours which are normal, everyday, victimless ones practised by responsible, reasonable people. Let's have laws which exist to make society better and stop people being harmed or stolen from, not laws which are only enforced in order to impose political philosophies on people or make things harder for certain sections of society. The current obsession with speeding is almost completely down to a wish to bully motorists off the roads, with a side helping of revenue-saving/raising, and that is not a legitimate reason to enforce the law in such a way. Stop this anti-motorist nonsense and this abuse of the legal system, and respect for the law as a whole, as well as those who make such laws, will increase markedly. It certainly can't decrease much more.