My mom links to a news story about a Swiss man who received a fine of $290,000 for speeding. The fine was so high because of his extreme wealth: he supposedly has over $22 million to his name. (He was going 35 miles per hour over the speed limit.)
My mom first defends the fine but then challenges us to think about its implications:
[Y]ou can't punish very effectively with a fine unless you take the individual into account. This guy shouldn't be able to casually buy his way into having the rules not apply to him, which is what it would be if he paid the speeding fine that would burden lesser folk but is nothing to him.No, the principle justifying a variable fine in a speeding case doesn't extend to the prison hypothetical.
Now, let's extend this idea. Take a guy who loves solitude and spending time at home reading. Some other guy has lots of companions and loves going out every night and working and playing outdoors. They commit the same felony. Should they get the same prison term?
First, it would be too hard to collect accurate evidence of people's personal preferences even if we decided they're relevant in principle. It's relatively easy to determine someone's net worth. I'm not saying the evidence couldn't be fudged, but a court at least has a good chance of determining the answer within the right ballpark. If there's a legal standard having to do with something as amorphous as "how you like to spend your time," it would be practically begging both sides (especially the defendant) to lie.
Second, you'd need to consider that the introverted bibliophile doesn't love anything that can be labeled "solitude." Surely his preference is for comfortable furniture and soothing decor and access to a particular library of books and so on. For that matter, you could say that after all the extrovert's outdoorsy activities and adventures, he would actually benefit more from the solitude of prison than the introvert would; at least it could be said to balance out his earlier experiences.
That's all mostly beside the point, though, since the unpleasantness and unfreedom of prison can be presumed to be equally undesirable to everyone. Money has a fixed, objective value, which accounts for its diminishing utility. That is, the richer you are, the less personal value any fixed amount of money tends to have for you. But the desire for liberty is universal.
8 comments:
Great answer.
It made me think of 2 things to add. As to your first point, rich people (with good lawyers) would do a better job of portraying themselves as the kind of people who would suffer more in the prison environment. So in the effort to achieve truly subtle, nuanced equality, it would reinforce inequality.
As for your second point, I'm thinking that the solitary book-reader is more likely to be very sensitive and to find it difficult to adapt. We'd have to add in these subjective factors to figure out who hurts most in prison.
As for your third point, that's some socialist ideology that is used to steal freedom from all of us, and I am not buying it.
...I am not buying it.
Do you really think that a given amount of money -- say, $80,000 -- provides no greater value to, say, a married couple with children who's struggling to get by on one parent's $40,000 annual salary, than to a billionaire? That seems demonstrably false. This isn't a "socialist ideology"; it's a matter of fact.
Also, you seemed to be implicitly using some kind of diminishing-utility concept in your blog post where you approved of higher fines for multimillionaires.
Actually, what I disagree with more is the rejection of the notion that loss of freedom has variable impact.
As to the diminishing utility of money, I don't disagree with the basic proposition. I disagree with setting it up as leverage for other policy decisions, such as aggressively progressive taxation. I think if people who make a lot of money don't get to keep enough of the additional money that they could make, they will make different choices about how long and hard they will work and about what risks to take with the money they already have, and that will have a big impact on the economy, including the availability of good jobs for that $40,000 family that we all care about.
Oh, sorry, I completely misinterpreted what you meant by the "third point."
I think if people who make a lot of money don't get to keep enough of the additional money that they could make, they will make different choices about how long and hard they will work and about what risks to take with the money they already have, and that will have a big impact on the economy, including the availability of good jobs for that $40,000 family that we all care about.
That's an interesting idea, but one that Thomas Frank rebuts (pretty convinvingly, I think) in his book The Economic Naturalist's Field Guide. I don't have time right now to find the relevant passage, but I'll post it here later.
Robert Frank, I mean. I can never remember his name, it's so nondescript.
(I was mixing him up with the political commentator Thomas Frank, author of What's the Matter with Kansas?)
Here it is (this is a NYT column that also appears in his excellent book The Economic Naturalist's Field Guide):
"Because higher taxes on top earners reduce the reward for effort, it seems reasonable that they would induce people to work less, as trickle-down theorists claim. As every economics textbook makes clear, however, a decline in after-tax wages also exerts a second, opposing effect. By making people feel poorer, it provides them with an incentive to recoup their income loss by working harder than before. Economic theory says nothing about which of these offsetting effects may dominate. ...
"According to trickle-down theory, ... the cumulative effect of the last century’s sharp rise in real wages should have been a significant increase in hours worked. In fact, however, the workweek is much shorter now than in 1900. ...
"[E]ven though chief executives in Japan earn less than one-fifth what their American counterparts do and face substantially higher marginal tax rates, Japanese executives do not log shorter hours."
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