> The typical example is: would you want a boot to appear on your wheel, in your driveway, the minute your license plate expires?
As long as they simultaneously provide the renewal for the license, why not? It would even be a service, since I would have less of hassle dealing with it and remembering to go to their office.
A government that is so efficient that it is basically impossible to even get into trouble with these kinds of administrative things can be a very good thing, as long as it is sufficiently good-natured.
The trouble comes in areas where there is more uncertainty, with laws that are so flexible that it's hard to tell whether you're guilty or not even when you know all the facts. If any prosecutor with an ax to grind can charge anybody with a crime, you have a problem. If, in addition, there are efficient databases that allow the prosecutor to find evidence against anybody even long after the fact, you have a recipe for totalitarianism.
> A government that is so efficient that it is basically impossible to even get into trouble with these kinds of administrative things can be a very good thing, as long as it is sufficiently good-natured.
Indeed. One route (the one that I'm trying to keep echoing in my head these days) to thinking about such a nicely-efficient government is to ask how something would go in Iain Banks' Culture.
As long as they simultaneously provide the renewal for the license, why not? It would even be a service, since I would have less of hassle dealing with it and remembering to go to their office.
A government that is so efficient that it is basically impossible to even get into trouble with these kinds of administrative things can be a very good thing, as long as it is sufficiently good-natured.
The trouble comes in areas where there is more uncertainty, with laws that are so flexible that it's hard to tell whether you're guilty or not even when you know all the facts. If any prosecutor with an ax to grind can charge anybody with a crime, you have a problem. If, in addition, there are efficient databases that allow the prosecutor to find evidence against anybody even long after the fact, you have a recipe for totalitarianism.