Rules are Meant to be Broken
By TagoreTuesday, May 6th, 2008 at 1:47 am
Imagine driving down the freeway with your eye intensely gazing at the speedometer needle. Its right under 55 and you nervously brake to keep from speeding. The road slopes a bit and you head slightly downhill and you cringe as the speedometer crosses 55 and hits 57. Sirens begin to sound but there are no cop cars within miles of you. No, the sirens sound from within your car, and a $10 fine has been added to your tab of speeding violations that you will pay off at the end of the month.
Seems a bit absurd right? Well, it wouldn’t be terribly difficult. All it would take is some type of general surveillance between your car and the road that you were on that kept track of you speed and checked to make sure you were not violating any traffic laws. It should be easy enough of with the technology we have today, but the sheer idea of a surveillance system of this nature would drive shivers up my spine. The mere hassle of being constantly fined for driving would seriously motivate me to find new means of transportation. While that might not seem like a horrible result, you have to understand it would greatly hinder our efficiency as a society by placing unnecessary restrictions and penalties on ourselves.
We currently use a model that is dependent on the fact that it is impossible to have cops patrolling everywhere in order to detect traffic violations. But with the addition of traffic video cameras and overhead speed traps, you can see our America slowly gravitating towards an Orwellian future. Perhaps that’s a bit extreme, but you should get the idea. You are probably wondering why should we have speed limits if we do not want people to follow them? Well the idea is that we do want people to follow them and they set up guidelines, but we also do not want people to feel like “the government is out to get them.”
If you frequently speed, you are more likely to get caught by a random speed check. While you won’t get caught every time, you should get caught often enough to dissuade you from speeding. Furthermore, the penalties are strong enough to make such a breach of the law a serious issue. Obviously, they could make the penalties for speeding less significant while increasing their surveillance efforts, but I would contend that significantly increases inefficiencies in society. For starters, it creates more physical costs/paper work. But beyond that, it causes distrust between people and the government by making it a “permissions culture.” In other words, if the government is going to monitor ALL our activities to ensure we are not breaking any laws then we are yielding our rights to the government and giving them control over our actions. There should be a certain level of trust between people and the ruling body, similar to the relationship between parents and children. This of course goes beyond things like speeding tickets. Technology will continue to make increased surveillance a very real option, but if we are to avoid an authoritarian type government, the government must continue to trust the judgment of its people, even if that means laws get broken more often (when calculated in absolute terms). We have some very scary decisions to make over the next couple of decades, but when it comes down to the government monitoring daily activities of our lives, I will always come down in favor of a hands off approach.