Crime and Punishment
Found this in one of the comments on Fark:
So there was this Chinese Emperor way back in the day, and he was REAL big on punishment. His reasoning was that if you make the punishment for X severe enough, people simply won’t do X for fear of being punished. After examining this reasoning for a while, he came up with the following Grand Master Plan: execution for every offense, so people won’t do anything even remotely illegal or unpleasant.
About a year later, some of his troops were slogging through the mud trying to get somewhere, when one of them asked “hey guys, what’s the penalty for being late?”
His buddies replied in unison “death.”
He thought about this for a minute and said “OK, and what’s the penalty for having a revolution and chopping off the Emperor’s head?”
“Death.”
“Well, guys, I have some bad news. We’re late…”