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Well, I don't have a million dollars, so I wouldn't be able to pay that fine. It does not make sense to try to implement an unsupportable system. I did not say

Well, I don't have a million dollars, so I wouldn't be able to pay that fine. It does not make sense to try to implement an unsupportable system. I did not say a good objective was to avert people from speeding "as much as possible" (or I would simply destroy all cars). I said "as much as possible using reasonable techniques." I am not trying to revolutionize the field of public policy economics, here; I am just arguing against a system that assumes that a dollar means the same thing to me that it does to Steve Jobs; it does not, and some adjustment is appropriate.

ikeboy 7y ago
You're definitely arguing with various premises of public policy economics. Although you believe monetary fines are appropriate, you also claim to think we can't trade-off sacred values such as avoiding crime against mundane values like money. The beauty of a Pigovian system is it doesn't require any assumptions as to how much money is worth to different people, or for that matter how much actions are worth. It just calculates the harm to society of the action and sets a fine accordingly. This is very much standard economics, see https://www.jstor.org/stable/725557 https://www.jstor.org/stable/725557 with 300 citations.