No they're not. They're meant as a price. If they were meant as an unconditional deterrent then the penalty for everything should be death plus all of your assets.
That would maximize deterrence (and require us to be a lot more careful about what we pass laws against), but that's not what we're really after.
What we're trying to do is to keep the bad thing at a manageable level, which is exactly what proportionate penalties do, especially fines.
There are only a few crimes where the most important thing is deterrence, but those are the things we don't use fines for to begin with. For example, there is no fine for murder, the penalty is death, or life in prison, because we really are out to maximize deterrence there.
For everything else, if the fine is set appropriately then the cost to society of someone violating the law is less than the amount of the fine times the probability of being caught. If you then want to pay the price to do the thing, great -- we'll take your money and use it to save some lives somewhere else or do some other socially beneficial thing, and since you're paying more than the cost of the damage you're doing, everybody comes out ahead.
And if the fine isn't high enough to pay for the damage being done then it should be higher for everyone.
Why is it fair that rich people should be able to afford a Ferrari but poor people not? Why is it fair that rich people should be able to afford a house in the Hamptons but poor people not?
Because things cost money and if you want indulgences you have to pay for them.
How are they not good? The reason we have rules is that breaking the rules has costs to society. When the value of breaking the rule is worth more to you than the cost to society, it's a net beneficial transaction on both sides to let you do it in exchange for a premium.
The only way it's a problem is when the value is set wrong, so that you're only paying $100 but causing $1000 in damage. But that's not the fault of the premise of pricing damage, it's the general problem with corruption or government inefficiency. And the alternative is that the corruption causes you to be able to do $1000 in damage and pay nothing because the whole thing is swept under the table -- at least this way it's happening in the open and the public can evaluate whether the price is appropriate.
"The reason we have rules is that breaking the rules has costs to society. When the value of breaking the rule is worth more to you than the cost to society,"
What if the harm to society of a rich person breaking a law is more than the harm of a poor person breaking that law? The positive actions a person does may be magnified by wealth; why wouldn't the negative actions be?
No they're not. They're meant as a price. If they were meant as an unconditional deterrent then the penalty for everything should be death plus all of your assets.
That would maximize deterrence (and require us to be a lot more careful about what we pass laws against), but that's not what we're really after.
What we're trying to do is to keep the bad thing at a manageable level, which is exactly what proportionate penalties do, especially fines.
There are only a few crimes where the most important thing is deterrence, but those are the things we don't use fines for to begin with. For example, there is no fine for murder, the penalty is death, or life in prison, because we really are out to maximize deterrence there.
For everything else, if the fine is set appropriately then the cost to society of someone violating the law is less than the amount of the fine times the probability of being caught. If you then want to pay the price to do the thing, great -- we'll take your money and use it to save some lives somewhere else or do some other socially beneficial thing, and since you're paying more than the cost of the damage you're doing, everybody comes out ahead.
And if the fine isn't high enough to pay for the damage being done then it should be higher for everyone.