by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-06-23 10:55:23+00:00
>Not everyone is capable of buying laws.

Actually, no one is capable of 'buying' a law. Laws are passed via the processes of the legislative system. Sure, you can try to bribe someone like a Congressman into voting for or against certain things, but this is very different from just buying a law outright, and people are constantly watching Congressmen to ensure this kind of behavior doesn't get too out of hand.

"Nobody ever catches those bribes in practice." Gee, it sounds like you have a crime detection issue there. If only there were some decentralized mechanism, trending towards a 100% success rate, by which individual actors could personally benefit by exposing with evidence a Congressman took a bribe. :)

Apropos: The SEC whistleblower program has so far distributed over $2 billion to nearly 400 corporate insiders since 2011, and shows no sign of slowing down. We aren't lacking for success stories here when it comes to stopping shady financial deals, they're actually one of the easiest cases to handle.

>When Musk’s datacenter was photographed polluting more than declared it wasn’t an instant fine, it’s a lawsuit that the taxpayer pays for (implicit fine on the taxpayer).

You sound like you have a lot of knowledge about this case. If you were to share your knowledge with someone else who was pursuing this fine, so they could get a cut out of it, you could probably get paid yourself for doing so. Maybe you could have submitted more photographs, or air quality measurements, or just conversations with people working at the datacenter (who might themselves be getting paid a cut of your cut by you).

In so doing, you would have made the case against Musk stronger, and made it more likely the fine would be levied in the first place. If the crime actually happened, of course. Those are the kinds of strategies a "fine paid to the successful reporter" approach to legal enforcement allows for. They simply have no analogue in other approaches to the law. They operate on self-interest, not fear.

This is also an much, much more powerful way by which the "weaker members of society" you are concerned with can work together at scale to take down and prosecute a much larger entity. One thing the disenfranchised do very well is information gathering. If you're unemployed or underemployed anyway, and you just have this burning passion of hating Musk or Richard Ramirez copycat killers or money launderers or child predators or whatever floats your boat, it would be very encouraging to know you might be able to eke out a living simply by investigating their crimes on your own time and getting paid for it by someone, without necessarily needing to get a JD.

>while they can afford to keep doing it themselves because for them everything becomes a lawsuit they can drag on forever, can afford, and costs you money too.

"Phase 2 of this process is incurably too slow anyway, so we might as well not even worry about optimizing Phase 1" is an engineering issue. It requires you to make a judgment call about whether Phase 1 is already 'good enough' as it is.

Considering that the lawsuit generally happens only after prosecution, the vast majority of information gathering, and back office work, what you are implying here is that you think all of that preceding work is already handled so competently that there's no reason in worrying about it. It's no longer the bottleneck of the system.

Very few people would agree with that.

>coming from a country which in the past “democratized” and incentivized reporting “bad” behavior

As far as I'm aware no democratic country has yet instituted fine-based bounties widely across its executive apparatus. So I don't actually know which country you could be referring to.

If, however, you're talking about a democratic country where this approach is employed in certain areas of legal enforcement, I would point out that, if you live in the United States, you actually still live under such a regime. See the SEC whistleblower's cases mentioned above, or the FBI's Most Wanted list.

The reason you don't hear about them very often is both due to their currently specialized nature, and because they just... Work. Quietly, in the background.

So far I haven't heard anyone complaining about the Orwellian dystopia that the False Claims Act is creating for good honest hedge fund managers who just want to maximize their portfolio earnings, although I'm sure they're out there.