On the issue of crime and lack of punishment
My Column in Yesterday’s DNA :
We all know that when we go to a shop we ask for a bill, yet for a few rupees less or to save a minute or two, we don’t ask for the bill. A legitimate bill allows the government to collect taxes. No bill means no tax. Most of this kind of behaviour for many of us is justifiable. After all, why should you follow traffic rules, no one else does. Similarly, why pay taxes? Why not save that money? After all, we know that the political class is going to eat up that money.
Take this behaviour one step ahead. We all know people who have given or taken dowry. We know people who beat their wives. We have heard, in hushed voices of, people who have chosen to selectively terminate pregnancy because they don’t want a girl child. We also know of people who bribe; those who give bribes and those who take bribes. In all, most of us know a lot of people who indulge in criminal behaviour. And most likely, none of them is a politician or a goon. In most cases they are people like us.
Educated, middleclass, upper middle-class. They are professionals. Lawyers, chartered accountants, media professionals, doctors, MBAs. All break rules, break the law and get away with it.We can turn around and justify this behaviour, and all of us know most of the justifications. These range from ‘everyone does it’ to ‘it is none of my business’. But, what most of us do not realise is that we too are indulging in criminal behaviour. There are three levels of crime. There is the criminal: the person who commits the crime. There is the person who knows in advance that a crime is going to be committed, but keeps quiet. Then there is the person who knows about a crime after it has been committed and keeps quiet. Both these can be termed accomplices.
read the rest here
I did not read past the 1st paragraph. Maybe you redeemed yourself subsequently. But seriously, your equivalence between sales tax(or a similar tax) and traffic laws is so stupendously stupid that I am yet to recover. The former is an imposition of government’s writ — which no reasonable individual would liken to the latter which is a organization of society, in this case being regulated by a collective which merely happens to be called government. The latter, in some form or the other, will always and has always existed. And is organic. Or, at least should be — in theory. The former is an imposition.
Only twisted fucks who assume the existence of a government and a nation state apriori will claim an equivalence here.