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Comment by TylerE | Hacker News Reader

Just give them the corporate death penalty all ready.

What does that mean? The government just takes investors’ property when it doesn’t like what they do? That’s called expropriation. It redistributes the assets to the shareholders? They could just reconstitute the parts. This concept does not happen because it is silly.

In this context the "Corporate death penalty" could just be allowing them to get sued for the full amount of the damage they caused without baling them out. In practice, there is no way that they could survive that.

If you forced them to stop doing business and sell their assets, the shareholders would just get money. You can't simply rebuild a company from that, not to mention they'd probably get a significant haircut from that forced sale.

It may be appropriate, but that is such a rare tool to have used, you could argue that it should be avoided at all costs. Watching the government unravel companies just strikes me as dangerous.

That said, I find these credit agencies to be absurd, and need to either disappear or 100% change their business.

>you could argue that it should be avoided at all costs

ok, argue this.

Because at some point along the spectrum, the truly bad, "don't deserve to exist" companies eventually turns into the government and party in power picking winners and losers. Depending on the party, this could be anyone from Goldman Sachs to Monsanto to the Washington Post, to Peabody Energy (coal).

Normalizing the corporate death penalty starts the ball rolling towards this end.

I don't buy slippery-slope arguments as a general rule. The tool (corporate charter revocation) exists for a reason, and should be used if that reason is met. Sure, we must be constantly vigilant to ensure the tool isn't used for evil or with bias, but that's true of anything that can be used for good or bad.

It's pursued in the judicial system. Our judiciary has been, in the past, fairly non-partisan.

How many years can a corporation spend in jail?

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