Running People Over is a Free Lunch (comparing politicians to scientists)

I recently saw I think an email alerting me to a tweet, that Governor DeSantis would be signing new anti-riot legislation sent by Speaker Chris Sprowls and the legislature. Whatever it was, it was deemed to be sufficiently informative that I could decide whether these politicians were improving Florida and should get my vote in the next election. I don’t know what the actual details of the law are. But if it is anything like past legislation discussed for rioting or looting, or Republicans in general, I can guess it involves some combination of shooting people, running people over, and putting people in prison.

Leftists immediately started ranting about the First Amendment, and their right to protest. Sophomoric Republican polemicists came back with the talking point “this won’t affect peaceful protestors.” Saying the new protest laws won’t affect peaceful protestors, is like saying communism will feed everyone and improve the standard of living for the poor. This is the government we are talking about. Sure, if we gave the government the coercive power to centrally plan production, they could plan production of food and medicine. But when actually given the power, the main thing they plan to manufacture is votes and nukes. Any law that attempts to gentrify vehicular homicide will be lies and mud wrestling, with everyone getting their lives ruined except the lawyers.

It is precisely the utopian view of policing that “this won’t affect peaceful protestors”, that Americans are protesting. Millions of people are angry, not because of a theory about police, but because their actual personal experience with something which others insist they should not fear. Republicans know the justice system is garbage like the post office. They believe that imperfect justice is good, because it only affects criminals or undesirables, and is more beneficial the worse it is for the “customers”. This garbage by design, protected by immunity, makes millions of ordinary people into their enemies. It is a political disaster in plain sight.

It struck me what kind of people must DeSantis and Sprowls imagine they are, that they can find such low-hanging fruit to improve the lives of Floridians, through a simple formula of shooting, imprisoning, and running over? Like how easy is it to just say hey, we should relax the laws on homicide with these specific details, and it is just that easy to come up with a steady stream of ways to improve people’s lives? After a year of this, these elected officials will surely have us all living in utopia, or will have cured all the flaws of mankind.

I immediately thought of the recent coronavirus vaccine trials to, and how important it was to prove the vaccines were effective, and not harmful, before giving them to any number of people. Like first they gave them to just a few people, to make sure they didn’t get sick from the vaccine. And if that worked out, after a while they could try it on a larger group of people. And there were some criteria, like it had to prevent the virus in at least 50% of people. And it had to be not more harmful than other vaccines, or the virus itself. And if some people got sick from the vaccine, or if something weird or unexpected happen like in Australia where some patients tested positive for AIDS, they immediately shut it down to examine what was happening.

There is nothing like that in the legislative process. Sprowls and DeSantis and their voters just assume they are extraordinary men, who can come up with a formula with more benefits than harmful side effects on the first try. If the consequences of the legislation turn out to do more harm than good, there is no instant shutdown trigger. There is not even proposed a way to measure the harm and good the legislation is doing. And even if there were, surely politicians with pride on the line would attack anyone trying to discredit the results of their legislation. Or they would change the claimed purpose of the legislation, redefining what it was supposed to accomplish, to claim it was still a success measured in a different way.

Finally they would say at least the legislation proves we care about people, we are trying. The legislation proved our sincere intent to improve the lives of Floridians, and that is enough to win your vote. We are at least enacting the will of the voters, who believe some number of people are bad and need to be shot to reduce the number of bad people. So we are at least being faithful to the general principles, the philosophy of the voters, even if it just resulted in
more people getting shot. There was never any control group, to see if there was actually any less looting than in the half of the state that didn’t get the law. This would be like just shooting random stuff into people’s arms to prevent the virus, and saying “At least our heart is in the right place.”

Like suppose the law says you can shoot people who try to loot your store, with no punishment for murder. In theory, nobody might get shot. It might be a deterrent, so that nobody even tries looting. Even if there is no looting currently, this would still be a safe cure. But what if in some percentage of instances, people use the law as an excuse to shoot people in the street whom they disagree with politically, and then drag their bodies a few feet to into the doorway, to claim they were looting? Now we would want to know how much looting was there before and after the law, to weigh it against how many dead people before and after. Or we would want to at least know if the people who got shot supported our political opponents.

Or suppose it is just too complicated for police to sort out, whether a homicide should be allowed under the new law in a given instance. Like in some instances the police might be friends with the store owner, and will write it up as a good kill even 10 feet from the door. Or in other instances, the person who got killed might be a niece of a cop’s friend. In that case the store owner might be convicted of murder, even if the looter was in the store carrying merchandise. In all instances it will fill the courts up for decades, neglect other murder and theft cases, and ruin the lives and finances of shopkeepers, families of the accused, and taxpayers. All that needs to be weighed against the reduction in looting, and the original criteria for success, promised in the law.

But none of that honest quantitative measurement of the results will ever happen, or even be proposed, or even considered remotely necessary. Unlike the vaccine, these laws can literally result in people being run over and killed for 20 years, perhaps without any benefit. And it will be up to the voters to suffer being shot and run over, and being dragged to court and sitting in prison for shooting people and running them over, to decide the law had ill effects. At
the end of it, at least half of people will hate policemen, on top of already hating shopkeepers and rioters. And all the while, the party that wrote the law will continue to insist it did more good than harm. They can never admit any outcome is proof they are bad or imperfect people, lacking infinite wisdom.

Finally after 50 years, the original authors of the law will be long gone without ever paying a price. Everyone will hate the party who used them as guinea pigs for this false cure for 50 years. But the core constituents of the party will never nominate anyone who threatens to take away their right to kill bad people in any situation. And everyone else will literally vote for communists, to get some relief from the vehicular-homicide-cop-court-murder-prison-politician-utopia, that was designed instantly based on a theory, without any criteria, control group, or shutdown mechanism, other than 50 years of misery and political conflict.

Whatever grand designs “thou shalt not kill” and “first do no harm” may deprive you of, they at least result in less work for lawyers. The new laws in Florida have the additional benefit, of causing people to vote Democrat.