Fair is Fair

You and I are reasonable people.
Both of us are willing to concede that.
So let us assume, just for fun and sanity,
that a law against drunken driving,
and a fine for drunken driving,
is to make drunks think twice about
driving around drunk, killing people.

Suppose we suggest that such a fine, for a third offense,
should be $10,000.  That might follow after a $1000.
and a $5000. fine for first and second offenses.
And, if you cannot pay the fine, you might have to spend
30 or 90 days, or a year in jail, as the habit continues.

Fair enough!  Change the numbers!  It doesn't matter.

If you are relatively poor, you are either going to pay
a lot of money, or spend a fair amount of time in jail.
The money alone might represent half of your annual salary,
and the time in jail would affect your life even more drastically.

However, if you are relatively rich, it is no big deal.
You pay the fine each time.  You never go to jail.
You play the old college drinking game:
drink too much, fall down, get into your car, run into something.

Or somebody.

That is how we do it:  fair and square!
If you are poor, it ruins your life.
If you are wealthy, it ruins someone else's.

In parts of Europe, they have figured that out.
Flat fines don't mean diddly crap if you have money.
It is a nuisance, not a deterrent.  Would fining
a professional basketball player $10,000.
for bringing a gun into the locker room
scare the living begeezus out of him?
Nope!  He earns that with every free throw.

So in the Scandinavian countries, in Germany and France,
and in Switzerland and Austria, if you have a lot of money,
and if they want you to learn not to speed recklessly through town,
or to stop driving drunk, they fine you according to your ability to pay.

In Finland, in 2004, a wealthy speeder was fined $190,000. 
They were just trying to get his attention.  More recently,
Swiss authorities fined a millionaire Ferrari driver $290,000.
They described the offender as a "traffic thug".  He had paid
no attention to the small, fixed fines, such as we use here.

Well, money has it privileges. 
For one thing, you can afford to drive a Ferrari.
And you can afford to pay, and laugh about,
and to ignore, the threat of repeated small fines. 
Three hundred thousand dollars might catch your attention, however.

There are limits to this European commitment
to paying in proportion to what might catch your attention.
In Germany, they cannot fine you more than $16,000,000.
But even Bill Gates might ease off the pedal for that amount.

In France, they once passed a law that said that it was illegal
to sleep under the bridges.  When people protested that the law
was aimed specifically at the very poor, the authorities said
that the law did not differentiate:  neither the rich not the poor
were permitted to sleep under the bridges. 

We, here, want to be fair.
We are color blind in our justice system,
except for the color green.  Fair is fair.