Kevin Drum at Calpundit says:
But why do I get the feeling that most people who complain about traffic cameras are actually just people who routinely push their luck at intersections and are afraid of getting caught? Is it because their principled arguments always strike me as completely lame?
Yeah, that’s it.
I’d note that, in my experience, complaints about enforcement of road safety laws of all kinds come mainly from the political right, and, as Kevin notes, mostly from people who routinely break the law themselves.
By contrast, suggestions for more lenient treatment of burglars, drug users etc come mostly from liberals, most of whom are not prone to burglary or even (relative to the general population) illegal drug use. This, along with the Bill Bennett affair, leads me to the following gigantic overgeneralisation. Conservatives make excuses for their own wrongdoing, liberals for the wrongdoing of others.
John Quiggin 
What about people who do no wrong? Or ones who don’t make excuses? And the subset of the latter who are misunderstood and misrepresented as making excuses anyway?
A lot of this is hard to measure.
Oh, and consider standard police excuses (also used by those in favour of global policemen):-
– we can’t do anything without your co-operation (but what can they do WITH it?); and
– you’re glad enough of us when you’re in trouble (but would we need you anyway if your “policing” didn’t prevent us fending for ourselves in the first place? what gratitude is deserved for “solving” a problem you manufactured and/or encouraged?).
I put this police example forward both because it seems very common in my experience and because it isn’t “people” making excuses for “people” but for an institution or approach. What difference does that make, if any?
I prefer the overgeneralisation that people use the government to protect the world from themselves. Conservatives fear their own homosexuality and sexual deviancy and the lure of drugs – so they want to ban such evil behaviour. The left know that they wouldn’t give money to charity if left to themselves – and so want to enforce such behaviour.
It is an over-generalisation but I think secret sin theory has a grain of truth to it somewhere.
“Conservatives make excuses for their own wrongdoing, liberals for the wrongdoing of others”.
A more concrete way of saying this (or at least what I think you mean) is that conservatives generally trust the police, while liberals don’t. The relates back to the wrongdoing point, in that, to the extent that many conservatives are below-the-radar crims, they possess and wear with pride all the pompous, hypocritical morality of an off-duty cop on the take.
Liberals (like me) just do not trust cops, period. Being always “on duty”, morality-wise, our self-probity is (quite naturally) fallible, but it’s still a country mile ahead of the main cop-morality game of playground punch’n’demurrer.
I think it is a very good generalisation – in fact one thinker comes to mind – Ken Wilber – who has a very similar generalized approach to the differences between liberals and conservatives. Essentially conservatives always blame the internal (individual) for a problem while liberals always blame the external (society/government). Thus for unemployment a conservative would say ‘they are just lazy sods who cannot be bothered finding work’ while a liberal would say ‘it’s society’s fault for not providing them with opportunities’. The drug problem: conservatives blame the user and ignore the harm of government policies, liberals blame society/government policy and the user is always a victim. The ‘truth’ of the matter lies in between – neither the liberal nor the conservative is fully right or wrong – the problems are always a mixture of the individual and society. Until both sides admit this I feel there will be little progress on such issues.
“Conservatives make excuses for their own wrongdoing”
Pr Q confuses traditional conservatives with right wing libertarians.
Conservatives can be as hard on themselves, as the traditional conservative ideology of judgement & guilt, obligation & duty indicates.
The OT, a conservative political document if ever there was one, talked a lot about “an eye for an eye”.
OTOH the NT, a much more liberal text, suggested that one should “judge not, lest ye be judged”.
Ayn Rand split the difference by suggesting that one should “judge and be prepared to be judged”.
HOwever traditional conservatives are probably a declinging fragment of the political Right.
Libertarians just want to have fun, and any excuse will do.
MOst libertarians champion an ethic of individual personal responsibility.
THus they reject societal constraints on self-regarding behavior, but they also abjure societal assistance when things go wrong.
They tend to draw the circle of individual inviolability rather extensively, inviting the possibility of overlapping spheres of influence.
They are willing to allow the resulting
“externality” conflicts to be resolved by the courts rather than the statutes.
Hence libertarian societies tend to be “over-lawyered”.
A bit off the mark there Jack. The following statements are not true:
Libertarians just want to have fun, and any excuse will do.
I would suggest that most humans want to have fun, and the real thing that differentiates libertarians is that they generally believe that voluntary interaction will lead to a better outcome than coerced interaction.
Thus they (libertarians) reject societal constraints on self-regarding behavior, but they also abjure societal assistance when things go wrong.
This makes the typical mistake of thinking that the government is society. It is not. Libertarians do not oppose society. In fact, the libertarian political philosophy is based very strongly on an acceptence of a strong civil society. The difference is that libertarians tend to reject coercion, and hence reject the actions of coercive institutions. That is – the government.
The difference between libertarians and statists is not ‘individual v society’. It is ‘voluntary society v coerced society’. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, this seems to be a point that some people refuse to understand.
‘They [libertarians] are willing to allow the resulting “externality” conflicts to be resolved by the courts rather than the statutes.’
No, apart from those that have an acceptance of the sovereignty of the law on top of their other beliefs. And if they did have that, they might equally allow statutes to control. But a true libertarian might well not even allow any special merits to the courts and might prefer violence to going to law.
“Might”, not “must”; have a look at how these things worked out in the Middle Ages. Sometimes people preferred war war to jaw jaw, and the only backing for the latter was that there might be recourse to the former. Which of course meant that violence was occasional rather than routine (though never irregular when it did happen).
I don’t know where you got your idea of a “true libertarian” from. Presumably you’re talking about an anarchist – but even then you’ve got it wrong. An anarchist doesn’t prefer violence to law… they simply prefer private law to public law.
It is true that most libertarians prefer common law rather than statute law – in most instances. Though, as most libertarians are utilitarians, its near impossible to use a blanket rule (Jason Soon for instance would prefer legislation in a number of areas where he sees potential efficiency savings).
“An anarchist doesn’t prefer violence to law… they simply prefer private law to public law.”
Again, IT AIN’T NECESSARILY SO. That is the point I was making – that while some are like that, some are NOT, so the generalisation is wrong. Nor should you suppose that I am arguing the opposite, that “an anarchist prefers violence”, nor that I am categorising some libertarians as “true libertarians” and others not. Both are “true”, but since both are different and both exist (non empty sets), the first broad claim about libertarians preferring court action… fails.
Because there are exceptions.
I guess I can’t rule it out – but as a person quite heavily involved in the libertarian movement and well read on anarchy I can honestly say that there are no capitalist anarchists who don’t conform to my above suggestion (anarchists simply prefer private law to public law).
The confusion might lie in the history of the word anarchist. The word now effectively has three meanings:
– anarchy as in no rules and violence and young people with guns and a lot of anger. this is not a political philosophy, but a description of a state of no law. This is what most people think of when you say ‘anarchy’.
– anarcho-communism or anarcho-syndicalism being communism which refuses to go through the socialist stage first (e.g. George Orwell, Noam Chomsky)
– anarcho-capitalism, which is the sub-set of libertarian though that basically takes capitalism to its extreme by privatising everything, including the law and courts (e.g. David Friedman).
Here’s a secret.
While not part of any movement at all (which may be influencing your own data sources, so you are getting a bias in what you hear – anyone else is not a “true” whatever), I have been philosophically influenced by Stirner and Ganshof since I was an undergraduate. While recognising its impracticality in USUAL circumstances, I philosophically prefer the idea of oneself and one’s own being the last resort and “energy” behind any substitute legalistic processes (and I have personal experience of unusual circumstances arising – which is plausible, over the course of a lifetime).
I have no respect whatsoever for any claim of intrinsic primacy for law or even “democracy” as such (as opposed to their practicality, or the psychological claims of affinity in the things we live by).
Democracy is clearly an incomplete system, and so is law; each rests on other outside stuff.
Getting back to the traffic camera thing…
People complain about “enforcement” of road safety laws because in most cases, said “enforcement” does very little to encourage saftey, and a lot to boost police coffers.
Putting speed cameras right on the edge and speed reduction zones is a favourite tactic of police, regardless of whether or not it is a dangerous area. One would think, that with a limited number of speed cameras available, they would be utilised in areas that produce the most number of accidents. This is rarely the case.
The fact is that posted limits are not always indictative of the relative safety of the road. Why is the speed limit 90km/h on a 6 lane freeway in the city, yet 110 km/h on a single carriageway country highway infested with road trains?
Putting cameras where people tend to speed is not road safety, it’s taxation. Forcing people to wear seat belts, and then fining them for not doing so, isn’t protecting anyone. A $400 fine for ignoring a red right-turn arrow at 5am is not increasing road safety. It’s revenue raising, pure and simple.
There’s a whole economy based around “road safety” that serves no purpose except to bolster a massive beauracracy. Every year we have more policemen, and every year a lesser percentage of them are working on actual crime.
If you want to increase road safety, the most effective methods are to a:) Improve the quality of roads and b:) Apply more stringent driving tests.
Too much money goes to “enforcement” of road safety and not nearly enough to improving roads. Option b:) is politically impossible because having a driving licence is a necessity in today’s society, and nobody is willing to make it tougher. There’s also a fair chance it would skew along gender lines (which way it would skew would depend on the test).
And yes, I’ve had more than my fair share of speeding tickets in my time. I haven’t ever had an accident though. My younger sister, who never exceeds the speed limit, has had 3 in 3 years. Who is a bigger threat to road safety?
Yobbo, to check the validity of your claim you need only compare the change in road deaths in Australia, where enforcement has been steadily tightened and deaths have (almost as) steadily fallen, with those in the US, where enforcement has generally remained lax and deaths have risen. I presented the data here.