Based on what you say above, I do not think we fundamentally disagree. There are orthogonal dimensions to safety mechanism design which are all important.
I somewhat singled out your line of ‘the lower the better’ because I felt that your taxation framing was too one-dimensional.
There is another matter: in US/UK political discourse, it common that if someone wants to prevent the government from doing something useful, this something will be framed as a tax, or as interfering with economic efficiency. If someone does want the government to actually do a thing, in fact spend lavishly on doing it, the same thing will often be framed as enforcement. This observation says something about the quality of the political discourse. But as a continental European, it is not the quality of the discourse I want to examine here, only the rhetorical implications.
When you frame your safety dials as taxation, then rhetorically you are somewhat shooting yourself in the foot, if you want proceed by arguing that these dials should not be thrown out of the discussion.
When re-framed as enforcement, the cost of using these safety dials suddenly does not sound as problematic anymore.
But enforcement, in a way that limits freedom of action, is indeed a burden to those at the receiving end, and if enforcement is too heavy they might seek to escape it altogether. I agree that perfectly inescapable watertight enforcement is practically nonexistent in this world, in fact I consider its non-existence to be more of a desirable feature of society than it is a bug.
But to use your terminology, the level of enforcement applied to something is just one of these tradeoff dials that stink. That does not mean we should throw out the dial.
Based on what you say above, I do not think we fundamentally disagree. There are orthogonal dimensions to safety mechanism design which are all important.
I somewhat singled out your line of ‘the lower the better’ because I felt that your taxation framing was too one-dimensional.
There is another matter: in US/UK political discourse, it common that if someone wants to prevent the government from doing something useful, this something will be framed as a tax, or as interfering with economic efficiency. If someone does want the government to actually do a thing, in fact spend lavishly on doing it, the same thing will often be framed as enforcement. This observation says something about the quality of the political discourse. But as a continental European, it is not the quality of the discourse I want to examine here, only the rhetorical implications.
When you frame your safety dials as taxation, then rhetorically you are somewhat shooting yourself in the foot, if you want proceed by arguing that these dials should not be thrown out of the discussion.
When re-framed as enforcement, the cost of using these safety dials suddenly does not sound as problematic anymore.
But enforcement, in a way that limits freedom of action, is indeed a burden to those at the receiving end, and if enforcement is too heavy they might seek to escape it altogether. I agree that perfectly inescapable watertight enforcement is practically nonexistent in this world, in fact I consider its non-existence to be more of a desirable feature of society than it is a bug.
But to use your terminology, the level of enforcement applied to something is just one of these tradeoff dials that stink. That does not mean we should throw out the dial.