Financing A Proper Government - Legal Costs

Courts in a properly governed LFC state would only prosecute 1 crime, the initiation of force. Gone are the state contrived, victimless crimes that clog up our courts like drug use, drunkenness and speeding tickets (though the Road companies would likely have contractual stipulations about such things). As a result the sheer volume of cases being seen by the courts would be drastically reduced as would the cost of running the judicial system.

Although the crime of initiating force deals with exactly that, there is a definite delineation between physical force (and the threat of it) and non-physical force. In order to be clear I will refer to these as Physical and Property crimes respectively. Physical crimes like assault, murder, robbery, extortion and the attempt thereof have at their base either actual physical harm, or the promise of physical harm. Whereas property crimes like fraud, theft (dealing with property not in the direct possession of another person as opposed to robbery), embezzlement and so forth do not have a physical aspect.

At this point I do not propose an overhaul of the justice system, (though certainly punishments ought to be more objective and less arbitrary than they are) what I would like to do is create a system that recoups much of its own costs. The thought that leaps to mind almost immediately is that if the court is relying on money recouped from the criminals for its own continued operation then that creates a situation where there is an incentive to convict and the impartiality of the court could be compromised, and that is true. Our legal system is supposed to be based on the idea that one is innocent until proven guilty. A judge has no incentive to prove guilt or innocence and that is the way it should remain. For as this story shows, if you monetise and incentivize the legal system judges can prove to be the real criminals.

So the decision of criminality must remain separate from the financial recovery of costs that accompany a legal punishment. With this in mind I propose that a financial audit be conducted for each legal case and that it be done by an independent 3^rd party whose payment is unrelated to the financial recovery.

The system could be designed so that it objectively determines the actual cost incurred by each party (prosecution and defence) and determines the financial responsibility based on an objective set of rules and regulations as well as the courts findings.

I do not think that this would necessarily mean that the guilty would automatically be charged for all the costs incurred. For example, if the prosecution in a murder trial spent thousands of dollars tracking down a false lead that had nothing to do with the actual crime then the defence should not be liable for that cost.

There may be another benefit of this plan in that taking another person to court could mean significant financial cost should a case be deemed to have no warrant, or the ruling is unfavourable. I wonder how many small claims and civil disputes would be handled by rational people on their own without the law being involved if the cost of the trip to court was objectively determined?