Eric Scheie at Classical Values has a picture of a no trespassing sign from Florida--where apparently trespassing on a construction site can be a felony. This is crazy. Felonies for most of our history have been really, really serious crimes: things like rape, murder, robbery, forgery. We keep distinctions between different categories of serious crimes because some crimes are really serious, and some are not so much.
I keep thinking of that Larry Niven short story where the need for transplantable organs leads to less and less serious crimes because capital--so that executed criminals could be "parted out" for transplantation. Eventually, they get it down to jaywalking. Niven was making a joke of the problem, right? Why is trespassing on a construction site a felony, then?
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