There's another post on here where this woman talks about dating a rich guy and she was like "oh you can't drink alcohol on a public sidewalk here" and he was like "Sure you can -- it's $500." Like he'd done it often enough that he had the "price" memorized.

the word "privilege" comes from the Latin privilegium, meaning "private law," or law granting one person or group benefits others don't enjoy

I remember reading an article about Koch Industries that said they just budget in fines for violating environmental regulations and lawsuit settlements for damage and accidents caused by broken pipelines -- it’s cheaper than installing cleaner, safer equipment.

Fines that aren’t adjusted to the means of the violator are worse than useless.

Punishable by fine = legal for the rich

“In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.” –Anatole France

This is true most places, but not everywhere. I have long been a fan of the Day Fine system, used in most Nordic countries. In this system, the fines are not set amounts of currency, they are set proportions of how much you make in a day or a week or a year. (And that includes investment income.) Small fine? Half a day’s wages. Big fine? Couple days’ wages.

So if you’re poor, the fine is small. Which, especially when combined with a minimum wage that actually reflects the cost of living and is automatically adjusted for inflation annually, means that fines are rarely devastating.

If you’re rich, the fine can be ... quite substantial. In Finland, for example, a really rich person once got a $100k speeding ticket. Ordinary rich people can pay in the $30k-$50k range. Which means that the fine is large enough that rich people actually ... care about it.

I read an article about a year ago, which I now cannot find, about a guy in Sweden who got a $50k parking ticket. He was furious, outraged, all over social media. Most Swedes were not sympathetic. But the article pointed out that the guy had spent the previous six months in an American city (DC, I think?) where he had racked up around $50k in total parking and driving tickets over the course of that six months (which breaks down to approximately $2,000 in tickets every week). Because each individual violation was small enough that he didn’t care, and even accumulating up to $50k, it still wasn’t enough to be actually painful in any way to him. So in both places, the US and Sweden, the guy spent the same amount of money on tickets. The difference is, in the US none of that money made any difference to his behavior. He continued to break traffic and parking laws. In Sweden, he double-parked once, and thereafter followed the law. Because while he could easily afford to spend $2,000/week in tickets, he couldn’t afford to spend $50k/week in parking tickets.