Fun stuff.... not

I am sure most everyone is aghast at this type of behavior from those who in theory should be serving us.

Except of course for a certain someone, who glorifies unaccountable and unchecked power of Federal actors to do whatever they please. Unfortunately, some people view this kind of behavior by the govt as a wonderful thing.

What does this have to do with over-regulation? Would deregulation somehow address Justice Department abuses?

Congress Demands Justice Department Explain Aaron Swartz Prosecution

Its the concept of making more rules and putting unaccountable people in charge of enforcing them, and incentivizing them to find ways to enforce them, regardless of whether it is sensible or even moral to do so.

Its all the same thing, just different sets of rulebooks and sometimes different sets of actors.

This is far from an isolated incident btw. Just since the victim here happened to be a well known and popular darling of the left, it actually got some media play... though not until his untimely and unfortunate demise of course.

You cannot take any group of people, give them vast powers to wield in the pursuit of enforcement of massive sets of often vague and arbitrary rules, shield them from any real outside accountability, and reward them for finding ways to wield the rules.... and expect good behavior. It does not matter if they work for the modern USA Govt, or a medieval church. The same results will be had every single time.

You would think we would have learned this by now.

is irrelevant and is important

This is not "another data point".

How do you figure? Its a pattern of human and governmental behavior that can be observed over the entire period of recorded history.

When you create enough rules, especially in a vague enough manner as to where you can conceivably apply a supposed infraction against practically anyone.. this is a problem. It becomes more of a problem when the enforcers have little or no oversight, and again an even larger problem when the over-sightless enforcers are rewarded for finding application of rules... and again an even bigger problem when those whom the rules were designed to inhibit become politically protected.

So we have a situation where the people who should be being pursued by the authorities aren't, and the authorities instead focus on finding ways to prey on the innocent to justify themselves and their budgets.

Or in the case of more minor regulations as opposed to felonies such as in the other thread- have people dedicate their resources to checking off the regulatory boxes because it is more cost effective to operate in that fashion, than it is to truly address the problems the regulations were intended to address.

Consider it the flip-side of enabling tort action via unmet regulation. You pointed out that non-complient actors can thereby open themselves to lawsuits , which is correct and you correctly point out that in many cases this can be a good thing.

However on the flip side, when you have large amounts of ineffective or unnecessary rules/regulations people still have to play CYA and spend resources getting those boxes checked which can result having fewer or no resources or incentive to properly address real problems.

The question of how to properly structure complex legal protections is not an easy one. But one thing that is apparent, is that when you reach a certain number of rules per issue.. perhaps a term "Regulatory Density" would be better... once that density is reached, I think you see negative returns. And I think this concept applies across all industries and facets of society, though the ideal Regulatory Density of certain areas like Health Care and Commercial Flight might be different than say that of package transportation or machine assembly.

If there was just one single law in existence, it would still be possible to abuse it this way.

But it would be an awful lot easier to keep track of and spot, and a lot harder to pull off regularly.

The fact that there is no 100% bulletproof answer does not mean there is not a huge spectrum of difference between the poles.