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Comment by atty | Hacker News Reader

I think there’s two points to address here.

1) it’s rare, if ever, that a CEO, CFO or COO faces jail time for crimes the company committed that are similar or worse compared to jail-able offenses by individuals. So your second point doesn’t really happen in practice.

2) shareholders SHOULD be punished for the actions of the company. If my dog maims you because of my negligence to control it, I’m liable. If a corporation knowingly commits crimes, then the CEO (and everyone in the chain down to whoever performed the criminal action) is a criminal, and the board and the shareholders should be liable for not exercising proper control and guidance. When you own something you also take on responsibility for that object. Stocks are no different.

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> So your second point doesn’t really happen in practice.

It happened in this case. From the article, "Zeeshan Zaidi, the former head of Ticketmaster’s artist services division, pled guilty in a related case to conspiring to hack the rival company..." Anyone else who conspired with him could be charged with the crimes.

> shareholders SHOULD be punished for the actions of the company.

The entire purpose of the corporate entity is so that investors can share in the ownership of a business that they do not manage without risking personal liability. Shareholders can completely lose their investment because of liabilities of the corporation, but they usually don't face personal liability.

Well, thanks to this genius system — and criminal-adjacent advocacy such as this — for ensuring that corporations which commit crimes will always be awash in investor money, since such criminal corporations enjoy an advantage over law-abiding corporations.

Advantaging criminality to this degree is a choice. Our economic institutions did not have to be designed in such a way that criminality is rewarded so highly. We could architect them differently — but then it would be harder for a small number of people to make a great deal of money ripping off the rest of us.

> ... such criminal corporations enjoy an advantage over law-abiding corporations.

There is no advantage to criminality. It is a general rule of law that no one should be able to profit from his crimes. That rule applies to corporations as well as individuals and there are many ways to hold corporations and their managers and employees accountable (civil and criminal liability are two of them).

My point was that passive investors shouldn't be criminally liable for criminal actions of employees of the corporation that they knew nothing about.

> There is no advantage to criminality.

Of course there is. That's why YCombinator prefers "naughty" companies that break rules but get away with it.

http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html

> "Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter."

Is there any doubt that YCombinator would be investing in TicketMaster if it were a startup? Is there any moral distance between the scofflaw insouciance of AirBNB and TicketMaster? TicketMaster just eliminated a threat to its quasi-monopoly through criminality and were rewarded because the criminal penalty was utterly inconsequential compared with the commercial advantage obtained. They have "won" in the "marketplace", as that criminality-advantaging "marketplace" was constructed.

The unjust demolition of TicketMaster's competitors, and the resulting systemic economic inefficiency, is underpinned by rhetoric like yours.

Seriously, as messed up as this is, what TicketMaster did is completely rational if the game is all about making $$ and the rules say, "$10 million fine. 1 guy go to jail. go directly to go and continue to collect $x billion/year".

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