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Comment by bgun | Hacker News Reader

But you can't "fix" greed. Even punishing greed doesn't make people less greedy. That's a bit like thinking that the war on drugs will make people want drugs less, or even seek them out less. Constraining an inflexible market only moves it to places you no longer control.

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You don't have to fix the greed, you have to add oversight and accountability with things like mandatory reporting that make it not worth doing these activities on any profitable scale.

>But you can't "fix" greed. Even punishing greed doesn't make people less greedy. That's a bit like thinking that the war on drugs will make people want drugs less

Or that punishing robbing banks makes people do it less?

Cant fix murdering people either, even punishing them dosen't stop it. We just have to accept that sometimes people get murdered. /s

Drop the /s and you’re right! We can’t fix people’s desire to murder other people. We punish harshly as a deterrent but unfortunately someone who’s in a place where they’ll murder someone usually isn’t weighing the risk or making a list of pros and cons. So people get murdered. It’s inevitable and there’s very little we can do to prevent it in general.

The point it is isnt a justification to let people go around murdering others.

Punishing bank robbing doesn’t make people want to rob banks any less. It just changes the incentive structure such that it’s not worth it to most would-be robbers with normal risk tolerance.

Bank robbing is an activity where punishment actually moves the needle on the risk of doing it. When you try punishing marijuana use you find out that the risk of getting caught is so low that even extremely steep punishments don’t affect people’s willingness to do it. Same with jaywalking.

>That's a bit like thinking that the war on drugs will make people want drugs less That might have been possible if that was the actual goal

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