Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Statist Justice vs. Real Justice

Here is a prime example of Statist justice:

An operator of TGI Fridays restaurants in New Jersey raided as part of Operation Swill has agreed to pay a $500,000 fine for serving customers cheap booze when they paid for top shelf.

...

The fine includes $400,000 for the violations and $100,000 to cover investigative costs.

The reason I say that this is Statist justice is because it clearly shows no restitution to the victims of TGIF's crime. And yes, it is a crime to defraud your customers. Essentially, they were lying about the quality of their product in order to get people to pay more. That's called stealing.

Statist justice means that the State has been harmed by all crimes, even if they are not the direct victims of said crime. In this case, $400,000 of the fine is nothing more than a shakedown as none of it going to the victims, just the local government's treasury.

In a true justice system, only the court costs would be involved and the victims would receive compensation under a court order. This is called restitution and it is the traditional form of justice that has long been abandoned in our post-post-modern-doubleplusgood era of feel-good justice and collective responsibility.

I also seriously doubt that the investigation cost $100,000 nor that the money that was gained from TGIF's dirty business was $400,000 as well. The other problem is that I doubt this particular chain of restaurants will be able to recover following the revelation that they are selling shitty liquor.

In any case, this is considered normal when it is an abnormal and perverse form of justice. The state of New Jersey does not deserve any money beyond what was spent to investigate the crime. That $400,000 should be dispersed directly to the people wronged by the booze switch.