by potato3732842 | 2025-10-28 22:49:12+00:00
I'm not anti-regulation (well, I can be). I'm anti-enforcement or an extremist about equality under the law.

The fact that someone who gets a government paycheck and spends most of their day poking his nose in other people's business with the prospect of levying fines is the defining feature of enforcement. The fact that one may have a bullet proof vest and a gun and the other a safety vest and a clipboard doesn't change much. A government backed threat of a $10k sized problem is still a government backed thread of a $10k problem is close to the same whether you're being railroaded on a questionable DUI (pretty common scandal type) or you've run afoul of some local commissioner/inspector (health, building/zoning, conservation, etc) who's got much more nebulously worded rules/laws at their disposal.

It just boggles the mind that someone facing a $2k criminal fine has all sorts of rights but some inspector can just waltz across your property, be all "this culverts looks too new, you've violated the clean water act, that'll be a ton of money and I'm forcing you to fix it" or "you should have brought X up to modern code when you did Y, that'll be $300/day retroactively back 2yr to the date that X showed up on our records"

You have no real procedural protections from non law enforcement parts of government. They more or less make their own rules for how they operate in enforcement of whatever they're tasked with enforcing. They can use not talking to them against you, etc, etc. Your only "real" option is to plead your case to this office or person who has fairly unilateral power of enforcement and who (unlike with cops/criminal matters) is subject to scant public records or quality of evidince or sharing any of that. Like it's absolutely routine to show up at a hearing for something and then the enforcers read off correspondence, calculations, etc, etc, which you could counter but were never told existed until they're used against you. Not that cops can't do that stuff too, but there's a ton of rules to prevent that from going in their favor which the rest of the bureaucracy mostly doesn't have.

Sure you can sue them, but that'll often cost an obscene amount of money and you can't really do that until after you've been harmed. The whole system up until you get into a "real court" is working against you and more or less presumes the enforcer is correct. Furthermore, unless you sue and you get into a court there's nothing analogous to a judge or jury for these types of things. This is in stark contrast with criminal matters and "high volume" civil matters (e.g. traffic stuff) where they have to at least pay lip service to the principals of it and courts or court like things are on the "default track" for how the process works.

For a real world example, in my town the commissioner would cruise around looking for new windows, issue fines presuming you've done a bunch of renovations, and then pressure people for entry, and if they denied him he'd send them a fine presuming that the entire room was renovated and that plumbing and electrical were done without permits and of course the fine is per day until you're in compliance. And of course even if none of that was done you had to let him in to prove it and he'd nab you for anything else he could. The only "winning" move was to know that the correct answer was "it was an emergency repair GFY." He's gone now thankfully.