When law enforcement breeds contempt

What happens when law enforcement becomes so intrusive and petty that people can expect to randomly incur the wrath of the state?

Well, if you're a British driver, insurance companies stop taking speeding convictions seriously.

Excessive speed camera ticketing in the UK has led a major insurance company to announce this week that it will ignore driver's license penalty points when setting rates. Swinton Insurance, which has two million customers, is seeking a competitive advantage by offering lower rates to the safe drivers who receive automated tickets for driving just a few miles per hour over the speed limit.

The U.K. is the land of intrusive law enforcement, with speed cameras and closed-circuit television monitoring citizens' every move, and arbitrary penalties applied to people with little recourse to an appeals process. This has meant tighter and tighter constraints upon personal behavior until ... well ... until the logical conclusion was reached. When everybody is a criminal, criminality becomes a laughing matter. Points from traffic offenses no longer count against drivers because those traffic offenses are no longer taken seriously.

This is only a small move, of course, but there's a lesson here for the control freaks. Tighter controls don't make people obedient--they make people view the controls with contempt.