Stalin would have liked red light cameras

I was born in the Soviet Union. Like many others born there, I don't trust cops and generally despise authority. Naturally, I don't like red light cameras at traffic lights. But I could never explain exactly why, except to point out that the companies running those cameras make a fortune.

Fortunately, Bill James thought about this, and explainedwhy he hates red light cameras (behind the pay wall). I agree wholeheartedly:

We all know why the city councils want red light cameras, don’t we? Money. You set up a camera at the right intersection, you can print 200 tickets a day. $85 a ticket, processing costs of $15. . .what is that, a half-million a year?

The problem is, you’re trying to punish people into driving more carefully. It will not work. It will backfire, absolutely and without question. We don’t know how it will backfire, exactly, but it will. Punishment works through the mechanism of fear. Fear changes people. It makes them angrier. Fear makes people dislike those who cause them to fear.

From the 1930's through the 1950's, Stalin sent millions of people to the gulag. This served the join purpose of punishing his enemies, and also of building up Siberia in strategic places where people did not want to live or work.

I've heard Stalin apologists defend his policy, saying that "well, it was cruel, but how else would they have built those canals & run those Siberian lumber mills"? In "Gulag Archipelago", gulag veteran Alexandr Solzhenitsyn challenges those people:

• What purpose did those canals serve?
• What was the cost of employing gulag guards in Siberia?

The White Sea Canal was built by gulag prisoners between 1931 and 1933. According to Wikipedia, 8,700 people died building the canal. It was never used heavily, and nowadays it take a dozen or so boats a day. The government is good at monopolizing resources, but has not been very good at delivering value in return. Not surprisingly, gulag labor was not very efficient.

Neither was this labor free. Solzhenitsyn pointed out that gulag guards in Siberia were paid double the rate of guards in Moscow, and they could retire in half the time. Needless to say, even pampered guards in Moscow were paid better than normal workers. So even with meager rations, no medicine and insufficient clothing, gulag workers' labor was far from free. It would have been more cost efficient to hire local people for many of the projects assigned to the gulag. Of course, Stalin often did not trust local people. I have read some speculation that Khrushchev scaled down the gulag project in part because it was not delivering much economic value to the motherland.

Of course, the red light cameras are not quite like the gulag. But they do dole out steep punishments to lots of law-abiding citizens. If they did not raise large amounts of revenue, they cameras would not be installed or maintained. They punish large numbers of normal people for "crimes" that we all commit, taxing them $100 at a time. As Bill James points out, no one would object to red light cameras if they sent you a warning, or fined you $10. It's the draconian fines that cause fear and resentment. Stalin would have been proud.