> Maybe there's an average of 3 felonies per day/month/year if you count all the small businesses that aren't complying with federal product/safety regulation to the letter (thus dragging up the average), but I can't think how realistically the average joe is committing 3 felonies per year.
To begin with, let's not ignore how broad a category "small business" is. Laws requiring health inspections or licenses etc. often operate on the basis of frequency or number of patrons. If you have around a dozen people over for movie night every Saturday with the event published on social media and you all chip in for pizza, are you a food service business? For that matter, is that a public performance in violation of copyright?
If some criminals break into one of your devices or your personal website while you're traveling and you find out about it while you're out of state but don't have time to deal with it until you get back home, have you committed a crime? What if they put some illegal materials there and you clean off the device but still have a backup containing the illegal materials? What if you do delete all of them right away; is that destruction of evidence? What if there's a federal law against keeping the materials and a state law against destruction of evidence and a very specific way to comply with both of them at the same time that may not have been clearly decided by the appellate court when it was happening but has been decided by the time they bring the case against you? What if it was clear ahead of time but wasn't intuitive and you can't afford a lawyer and can't have one appointed until after you've been charged?
It's unreasonable to expect ordinary people to be able to navigate this.
>To begin with, let's not ignore how broad a category "small business" is. Laws requiring health inspections or licenses etc. often operate on the basis of frequency or number of patrons. If you have around a dozen people over for movie night every Saturday with the event published on social media and you all chip in for pizza, are you a food service business? For that matter, is that a public performance in violation of copyright?
That's what courts are for. I don't think there's any case where people tried to prosecute a shared movie night as a business, because it'd be laughed out of court. Same goes for whether it's copyright infringement or not. Moreover if you look at how authoritarian regimes work in practice, dissents are often prosecuted under national security laws, campaign finance violations, or libel laws, not because they violated the health code by having a movie night.
> That's what courts are for.
That isn't really how courts work. If you're violating the letter of the law then you are breaking the law and an actual impartial judge would enforce it against you. In practice whether they let you get away with it is based in significant part on whether or not they like you. If the judge doesn't like the administration then maybe they do like you. But if the judge doesn't like you for the same reason the administration doesn't like you then you're going to jail. And it shouldn't have to depend on that; we shouldn't have laws that people are constantly in technical violation of so that the only thing keeping anyone out of jail is prosecutorial discretion and judicial affinity.
Meanwhile you can characterize anything in a negative light. A random home kitchen typically isn't going to meet the standards for commercial operation and the prosecutor's press release isn't going to say "we're prosecuting our enemies for movie night", it's going to say "defendants were operating a for-profit restaurant in violation of zoning rules and storing uncooked meat above fish in the freezer used for storing food sold for resale in violation of the health code" and then stick them with a fine that would make them lose their house.
> Moreover if you look at how authoritarian regimes work in practice, dissents are often prosecuted under national security laws, campaign finance violations, or libel laws, not because they violated the health code by having a movie night.
When the dictator of petrolistan wants to retaliate against their enemies and those laws are available for that, sure.
When the mayor of some US town wants to do the same thing, they might very well resort to health code violations that wouldn't have otherwise been enforced.
Deterrents well short of political executions are still very much official misconduct.
Dissidents are most often prosecuted under those laws, yes, which is a good reason to not have those laws. But I’m aware of at least one case where a Cuban dissident was apprehended and prosecuted for buying cement in the black market, something the government was able to know because they most likely had somebody tagging the person 24/7 [^1]
But that exotic case is not that much needed. Laws will be abused by the powers whenever they want; you don’t need to look farther than the current USA administration and how the president is using war powers to treat poor laborers as enemy combatants and send them to concentration camps. And yet, USA’s system of government was designed in a way that should have prevented the executive to abuse power; why it has failed is another (difficult) discussion, but the founding fathers seemed well acquainted with the despotism of other nations.
[^1]: https://www.rtve.es/noticias/20090828/cuba-detiene-a-disiden...