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Notes -
I was at my local organic co-op today, and I discovered that they have, as is typical of hippy-dippy stores, a reusable bag policy. In this case, every reusable bag I use, up to four total bags, gets me a small discount.
Being the sort of person who posts on the Motte, I immediately thought of gaming this system by putting as few items as possible in each bag. Preferably, I would buy four items, put one item in each bag, walk the bags out to my car, deposit the items in a separate container, then go back inside and repeat the cycle as often as necessary to get everything I want and maximize the discount.
This is, of course, both strictly legal under the store’s very poorly written policy, and also going to get me banned in no time.
But it led me to think of the deeper issue. Many, perhaps all, policies and laws are prone to extreme lawyer-brain galactic thinking like this. Imagine that the store couldn’t just ban me, because I am a member of the store and they can’t just get rid of me, and they must also put in place a policy that is fair to every member of the store. So they start trying to specify the volume of bag that must be filled, the types and sizes of bags that are allowed, minimum item counts in each bag. Soon, cashiers are bogged down in the minutiae of various arcane bag to discount ratios, rather than just scanning items and making pleasant small talk. Everyone is worse off, and the only plausible escape is to eliminate the discount itself, thus taking away a benefit of being a store member and reducing the overall value of that status, causing long-term harm to the store’s “health,” as it were.
Fortunately for my local Hippy Mart, they can still keep a FAFO policy in place for the chronically politically diseased such as myself. Anyways, I was just thinking about this and the contrast with the American legal system, which would be obviously incapable of maintaining such a simple and poorly written policy for longer than a nanosecond or two.
As I said recently, rules-lawyering is one of the main reasons why any functioning society needs to allow for 'spirit of the law' interpretations. Strict textualism just gets you extremely dumb stuff like this, where you redefine the whole neighborhood as a collective private house so you don't have to follow the rules of the sabbath; both shameless and clearly against the spirit of the whole thing, the adult equivalent of signing a contract and going a tiny bit outside the box or making a spelling mistake or getting the date wrong because that means you didn't actually sign it HAHA, suckers, it's not valid!!
In a wider way, this is a bigger problem with the modern justice system. A hundred years ago, a lot of low-level justice was dispensed by police directly. Some youths being annoying just got the shit beaten out of them with truncheons, and they learned their lesson. Today the cops aren't allowed to do that any more, and the justice system is incapable of anything like that kind of rapid, effective lesson.
But was "you can't flip a light switch" really against the spirit of Shabbat? Or carrying an object from one particularly subjectively defined area to another, for that matter.
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