There should be fines for driving recklessly. What speed constitutes reckless driving depends heavily on the roadway's current conditions, which are quite variable. It would be better if speed limit signs could be made to change based on current conditions.
There are some decent arguments that to many signs (including posted speed limits) regulating traffic can cause drivers to pay too much attention to the rules and too little attention the actual traffic conditions. Traffic regulations can make driving more dangerous. It is a matter of degree though. I am not saying that we should eliminate all signage, only focus on where it is important.
I used to be more opposed to speed limits than I am now. (It has never been a big issue with me though. I don't typically drive very fast.) In college I took a class on roadway design, which included the rules pertaining to the design speed of the road. (This is based primarily on how long it takes to stop for an intersection, or when a car becomes visible on the other side of a hill or a curve. It doesn't matter so much on long flat stretches of highways without intersections.) I now think that it is not a good idea to let people drive faster than a road's design speed.
Note that a road's design speed is not the same thing as its speed limit. It used to be that the speed limit was selected by subtracting 10 mph from a road's design speed, so that divers speeding only slightly would still be traveling at a perfectly safe rate. This is still used as a ceiling on speed limits, but most now roads have their speed limits reduced further due to politics. There are many roads where it would be perfectly safe to drive 85mph, but which have a speed limit of 55 due to action taken by Congress during the oil shortage of the Carter administration. (Congress cannot actually set the speed limits, so they instead threatened to withhold funding from the states who did not do as they wanted.) It was not about safety, but resource conservation. Experts testified that the fuel efficiency of the average car made in the US at that time decreased significantly beyond that speed. Modern cars are typically more efficient around 65 or even 70mph, but the speed limits have not been updated.
(The only time I ever got a speeding ticket it was for going about 34mph where the speed limit was normally 40mph. I did not notice that I happened to pass through a school zone, which reduced the speed limit to 25. It would be another 2 hours before any of the kids would be let out of school, so there was no good reason for the school zone to be treated any different than a regular stretch of road. My speed posed absolutely no danger to anyone, but apparently cops don't care about that. They just have to follow their poorly written regulations to the letter. Normally a first time speeding ticket would not cost so much, but going 9 mph over the speed limit in a school zone is treated pretty much the same as going 90 mph over the speed limit anywhere else.)
Reckless driving is not a victimless crime. Even if you do not end up hitting another vehicle or pedestrian, you still cause significant risks. You may damage the roadway, or give the road an unsafe reputation that may deter other drivers from using it. The owner of the roadway is always among the victims of a reckless driver, so speeding fines should go to whoever owns the roadway. (Currently in the US most roads are publicly owned and maintained, so the fines should go to reducing what taxpayers need to pay. It would be much better from an economic standpoint to replace public roads with private toll roads whose owners must pay a land value tax to be redistributed to the community.)
