Sam Hartman writes:
Also, most of us are engineers. We'd like to know that what we are
doing is absolutely legal. We don't want to know that if some customs
agent really wants to make our life difficult they could and it would
be hard for us. "Your trip will be safe unless you manage to make
someone at the airport hate you," is not as reassuring as "our
algorithm has been proved correct."
Unfortunately, many societies operate in just that way: there is a huge
difference between the letter of the law and enforcement. And the law
itself is so restrictive that nobody can actually obey it in real life.
So everyone is effectively violating it to some effect, which means that
the government (and its representatives) can selectively enforce it
against anyone who displeases it, while allowing the majority to violate
the law without consequences.
This principle of selective enforcement allows a government to control a
population far more effectively than mere laws alone. Virtually all
countries engage in it to some extent, but it is far worse in some
countries than in others. For example, it's much worse in France than
it is in the United States.
The general principle is to make sure that everyone is somehow doing
something illegal, so that anyone can be arrested and thrown in jail if
it becomes convenient to do so. The laws are designed to guarantee that
nobody can fully obey them, and selective enforcement keeps the masses
from complaining about them (most people equate non-enforcement with the
absence of a law in the first place, even though they are two very
different things).
--
Anthony
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