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Is there some method for preventing you from wearing a mask and beating the vagrant senseless with a baseball bat? The police are unlikely to investigate this particularly beyond just declaring it a fight between bums, if he reports it at all. Is there 24/7 surveillance to stop you from just hiring a local Mexican to change the windows when the city isn't looking, and simply not telling anyone you did?
At a certain level, respectable and polite people make it easy to enforce laws unevenly against them.
Which is a worse problem: a fire, or the arsonist who set it?
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As far as the vigilantism, more likely than not it would be fine. There's the risk of getting stabbed, and I'm a relatively petite guy. But getting stabbed with a hepatitic knife is kind of a medium case scenario. The worst case is the city figuring out it's some kind of vigilantism, deciding to make a grand symbolic point, and putting in the effort to ruin my and my family's lives. A year or two back a guy took a hose and sprayed down a homeless woman shitting in front of his business during open hours, and the city suddenly took far more interest in charging that assault than in homeless people stabbing each other. Additionally, there are hundreds of people doing the exact same thing or worse; it would be a drop in the bucket for little payoff.
People do do that, but it's taking a risk. You're surrounded by a 24/7 surveillance system called your neighbors. I'm on good terms with all of them, but if someone wanted to screw me over, it would be very easy.
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In the former case, unless everything goes shockingly well for you, including many things over which you have no control, you run a significant risk of literally destroying your life. Some would argue the entire purpose of participating in civilization is to avoid needing to take that risk in the first place.
In the latter case, unless you somehow don't have neighbors, and unless you're certain that every person who will ever pass in front of your house won't call up the police for an unpermitted job, there's no such thing as "when no one is looking" - your neighbors voted for the city government. Even then, it may still come up if you ever sell the property, or try to get other work done.
The previous poster spells out examples of obvious, deliberate, unequal enforcement of the law that specifically targets the kind of noncompliance you're suggesting no one would enforce against. Are you seriously suggesting this is a bluff we should call? If so, you go first.
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