In our free societies, we have intelligent living beings (humans) and artificial entities (companies, etc.) operating in a collective, or series of communicating collectives. We have governments draw up laws which act more like guides to behavior than strict enforcement of behavior, but where on the guide-enforcement scale any individual law is variable and dependent on the situation.
Typically our governmental systems are reactive: we need to see some kind of behavior happening more than once, before we inact laws to try and modify the behavior. Laws also tend to exist longer than they are needed, in the case that some kind of behavior disappears from normal observation. Once a law (or set of laws) is in place, very seldom (In My Humble Opinion) does the law get scrapped and replaced with something that (might) work better. Rather, the base law tends to be modified.
Government, or at least "free" government (government in a free society), exists at the pleasureof the citizens it represents. Most of the time, it doesn't seem like there is any pleasure to it.
The US Constitution seems to have a purpose of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Not a lot of about government there. Canada has a purpose of Peace, Order and Good Government. This gives us a little more to work from.
The reason for government originally, is that direct democracy became unmanagable. In a very small population, it is possible for every citizento listen to all arguments and vote on every issue which comes before the population. At a certain level of population, this is no longer true. The exact level depends in part on technology, but also on the ability of servicesto brief people on the issues (news and other organisations). It is possible to run a direct democracy with larger populations, but it sacrifices the requisite amount of briefing on the issues. There are other situations that require input but not voting, such as protection of the population and joint assets of the public (the country).
With small populations, many smalltasks are never categorised. If the task needs to be performed, it will get performed by someone, hopefully not too far after it is noticed that it needs to be performed. As a population grows in the presence of a government, official responsibility for carrying out that task is usually assigned to some position in the government.
Governments seem to always introduce the development of kingdoms, areas of responsibility administered by a king. And like any entity, they want to survive and grow. Even in a time when things do not change very quickly, this is a counter-productive tendency. A generation is about 20 years. A lot of "natural" processes take about 63% of a generation, or 20*(1-exp(-1))=12.64... years. I would suggest that no person in a position of authority be in that position longer than 12.64... years. When that person is moved to a different position, it should be as different as is possible; allowing for skills necessary to fulfill the new job. As one traverses up the promotion ladder, becoming a generalist is more and more important. This only serves to accentuate such a process. For areas of responsibility which change much faster than 20 years, I think the turnover rate should be higher. I am not sure how much faster it should be. Hopefully this time is long enough to allow those who truely want to advance things to get the job done, and not so long that those prone to kingdom buildingto build kingdoms which are too resiliant.
The elected part of government is there in most part, to enact laws. To see problems currently effecting society, and to generate guidelines to nudge/force developments along some chosen path. It is possible that the path chosen to go down, isn't the best one. So, there should always be the opportunity to change existing laws to better reflect current desires. Another possibility is that the need for some existing law is no longer there, and so should be removed. This doesn't seem to happen anywhere near often enough. In Canada, we have an Auditor General, and I would guess that monitoring the performanceof laws would fall into that branch of government. If the rate of a law being consultedfell to a low enough level, this would be evidence that the need for a law might have disappeared. But, given some of the stranger laws on the books, this process doesn't seem to happen.
The elected representatives in government, are more or less meant to be people without special knowledge, to represent the averagecitizen.
One thing I think governments need to remember, is that governments are there for the people. Artifical entities, like the various kinds of companies, are allowed as a convenience for the people.
Some laws have no meaning to the artificial entities in our society (a company can't illegally cross the street for instance). Some laws assume that these artifical entities respond in a similar manner to a human under the same circumstances. These artificial entities are essentially different, they have no fixed lifetime. Humans need air, water, food and shelter to survive; artificial entities basically just need money. Most of these artifical entities have access to larger amounts of money than human citizens do. When used to fund political lobbying (or worse bribery, etc.), these artifical entities usually have a significantly larger influence on the government than the citizens do.
I think that these artifical entities should be forbidden from any activities which would influence the government in its capacity to make laws. No donating money to political parties, no funding lobbying groups, no sponsoring research into issues of public policy, etc. We should also disregard any arguments with respect to the profitability or existance of any artificial entity based on how long it has existed, how many people it employs, how much money it has, etc. If some artifical entity goes out of existance because it couldn't adapt to changing market conditions, in most cases one or more replacements will step up to fill the void left by its passing.
Part of enacting laws often involves the concept of penaltiesfor disobeying/breaking the law. This link looks at penalties from a mathematical point of view. A less technical description is below.
In a society where all entities have about the same resources, which is the kind of society we tend to start out with, penalisation tends to be some kind of constant or linear function. If you get penalised once, you are penalised X. If you get penalised again, you might be penalised X, or maybe 2X, or something between X and 2X.
I don't think it is inevitable that a divergence in wealth happens, but this certainly seems to be a common theme across civilisations. However, when there is a distinct divergence in wealth, these constant or linear models for penalisation just don't work. If you set the penalty appropriately for the poorest member of society, it is insignificant to the wealthiest.
Related to penalties is the idea of enforcement. Not too long ago, "photo-radar" became a reality in my jurisdiction. Many people think that this is only a "tax grab". I think a large part of this is because people recognize that identifying cars that are speeding and taking pictures of them is a much more cost effective and time effective matter than police officers performing the same action using radar or other conventional means.
This misses the point! If our elected representatives feel that certain laws are needed, and some technological advance allows for a revolutionary change in enforcement "effectiveness", then by all means the new method should be used. The price of having elected representatives is that you might end up with a law like:
The speed limit in a school zone is 30 kilometers per hour, unless you are an elected representative of the people in a municipal/local, provincial or federal government, in which case you can travel 80 kilometers per hour. Penalties are [...].
In the case of speeding, start with photo-radar at every school zone and cross walk. Nobody (or very few) will complain about enforcement where children are. Some will complain about getting caught for speeding at places where pedestrian crossings are posted. If you want to cut down on speeding on a highway, put photo-radar every kilometer down the highway. If someone goes out and gets themselves 300 violations in one trip, they aren't going to be speeding too much in the future.
The point behind this is not generating revenue through enforcement. If there is a reason for a law to be in place, it should be enforced.
If this kind of revolutionary change in enforcement makes it possible for someone to be found in violation many times in short succession, and you are using the exponential type of penalties mentioned earlier, you should have some means of being fairer about things.
The way to make things more fair, is to be able to split some larger number of occurances all subject to this exponential "growth curve", into a number of groups where each group is judged on the exponential growth curve, multiplied the number of occurances in the group. If you don't do something like this, someone could conceivably end up getting a fine larger than the total amount of money in the world.
Coming up with a scheme to divide a string of individual occurances into some number of groups of occurances is something that would have to be decided by government, by legislation. This is not something which should be left up to a judge to decide. Some possible ways in the case of a string of infractions accumulated on a single trip are:
Our judicial system often seems to have more influence than it should in certain ways. Part of the reason why is that often there is insufficient guidance on the part of legislation in setting the magnitude of penalties.
The discretion in setting penalties should be limited to decisions on how to group multiple occurances, and some leeway in setting a multiplier on the base fine for the exponential growth curve. If we decide to work with base 'e' logarithms/exponentials, then we might want to give the judge the ability to increase or decrease the base fine by sqrt(e).