1. Some readers interpreted the post by the title instead of by the first two paragraphs, as about what the law should be instead of about the implication of looking at only one of the relevant issues and ignoring all the others. They objected that the conclusions were wrong, the assumptions unrealistic, which was true and relevant for what the law should be but not for what legal rules followed from ignoring everything other than the effect of the rule on the incentives of the victim. 2. Some readers did not understand, or understood and rejected, the strategy of which the argument in the post was an example, using drastically simplified models to work out the logic of a complicated problem in order to understand enough about it to make sense of the real world version. Consider the problem of launching a satellite. To learn how to solve it you start with a simple model, a cannon ball moving in a uniform gravitational field in a vacuum according to the laws of Newtonian mechanics....
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