[SR2Z]

The state is rarely capable of enforcing the law on more than a small minority of lawbreakers because enforcing the law is expensive.

If there's a busy road where people are routinely speeding, the state is actually incapable of pulling every single speeder over and ticketing them. Instead, the state relies on setting reasonable speed limits and scaring drivers with the prospect of fines.

This isn't a personal philosophy as much as it is a statement of truth: it's really expensive to enforce laws.

[kingsuper20]

>The state is rarely capable of enforcing the law on more than a small minority of lawbreakers

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.” ― A.I. Solzhenitsyn

[reader_mode]

>the state is actually incapable of pulling every single speeder over and ticketing them.

a) technology exists where you can just record license plates and send speeding tickets automatically - which is a nice prallel for mass surveilance tech - it makes large scale enforcement much cheaper

b) you don't really need to enforce on everyone, a high deterrant + random enforcement creates strong incentives against doing something (ie. making examples)

[pmiller2]

You don't think selective enforcement is about exertion of power?

[enraged_camel]

>> The state is rarely capable of enforcing the law on more than a small minority of lawbreakers because enforcing the law is expensive.

This makes no difference because nobody wants to play Russian roulette with regards to risking whether the state will come after them.

Indeed, the state’s power comes from this threat of force application.

[alisonkisk]

We now have speed cameras and semi automatic citations.

[sudosysgen]

The state is definitely capable of detecting every single speeder and sending them a ticket. You just need some smart centralization, wire traffic cameras and doppler radars on every corner, program tracking algorithms and decode the license plates to match them with the owner and record a fine.

It chooses not to.

[throwawaygh]

> It chooses not to.

Sometimes it does, which provides an interesting case study that proves slibhb's point -- "A law that is followed only as long as it is enforced is not much of a law and is unlikely to last."

One example is a portion of interstate near the St. Louis airport that runs through St. Ann, MO. (right next to Ferguson, MO), which resulted in changes to state law [1].

Many other munis in that region -- most notably Ferguson -- went far beyond strips of interstate and handed out fines as abundantly as possible, enforcing every law with an iron fist. And then the whole area exploded into chaos, reverberating out of the local community and, over a period of years, boiled over in dozens of communities.

You can rule with an iron fist. Until you can't.

[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/st-louis-county-municipal-cou...