> Who's to say that 10% of the maximum for a minor violation isn't proportionate?
A large body of case law, well-defined guidelines for evaluating harms and mapping them to fines, and the EU's general fear of stymieing economically productive activity (the motivation behind GDPR is to enable more data trading, not less, but within better-defined legal boundaries).
We have had laws with "open ended" sentencing guidelines since the very beginning of organised society. This is a solved problem.
There's a lot of American libertarians that believe government is intrinsically bad, for some reason. And also a monolith; they don't see any difference between bits of government, different branches, different types of enforcement, and so on. They're very loath to admit that it takes a certain minimum amount of structure to keep the roads open and the lights on.
I do agree with the power of government to break the prisoners dilemma regarding to public works, but not that they have that much control over people's behavior.
The tendency of people to follow laws has shown little relation to blunt enforcement. It has to do with peoples tendency to follow norms.
A large body of case law, well-defined guidelines for evaluating harms and mapping them to fines, and the EU's general fear of stymieing economically productive activity (the motivation behind GDPR is to enable more data trading, not less, but within better-defined legal boundaries).
We have had laws with "open ended" sentencing guidelines since the very beginning of organised society. This is a solved problem.