Last night my friend Adrean mentioned that in Finland, and in Denmark also, traffic fines are levied according to the income of the offender.
I’ll let that sit for a bit…
Like me you probably went through a few reactions that. In America, readers will probably have thought about a devotion to the notion of fairness and whether this system lives up to that. Most readers will also find a grain of satisfaction in that notion.
At first I immediately thought that this seemed fair. This morning I was considering it again and wondered if it didn’t just smack of a little reverse discrimination.
Assuming that most of us agree with the idea that a society has the right, indeed the obligation to have a an agreed set of rules that we agree to abide by and that we can impose consequences when we don’t.
A monetary fine is one of the methods we, as societies, have agreed upon that seems to be appropriate. And we do it, or at least we purport to do it, under the guise of it being a punishment.
Even the most amateur of psychologist among us would also probably also agree that punishment is levied to deter future action. This simple Pavlovian reaction is, we know at our heart, is the system by which we agree to coexist, raise children and conduct business.
So, when a Finnish law system imposed a fine of over $200,000 for a driver traveling 50mph in a 25mph zone, we have to wider whether this is indeed fair.
Undoubtedly a fine of something like $400 is more of a punishment to someone earning $40,000 per year than someone earning ten times that.
The incentive to alter one’s driving habits also, as an exemplar of the punishment reward code, is also greater for the lower income driver, and by extension less for the richer one. So are we creating, have we created, a system where those with means are less concerned about consequences, at least at the civil legal strata? And is this good for a society?
I might be a little colored in my thinking here, I just realize, by the fact that Caitlin, driving my car this week, was sideswiped by a driver on a downtown street, at 4:30 in the afternoon, and left by the side of the road while the Lincoln Navigator who had caved the driver’s side of our car, sped off. She’s fine, but the car is a different story.
Was it the thought that any punishment the drivers of the $30,000 SUV might receive was too high, or not enough to worry about, that led these two young white guys to ignore a fellow citizen that they had just caused potential harm to.
The notion of a civil society is one that I grew up with. If there exists different sets of incentives for different members of that society, shouldn’t we be aware of and concerned for that?