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Comment by boredumb | Hacker News Reader

There is no reason to go into the comments of every post that shows a price of the fee a company paid in order to express why you think a company that is fined should be crippled because of it, the point is to deter people not to lay nuclear landmines for companies to be destroyed over. 99% of these comments are just maliciously lashing out about 'corporations' and no consideration that chomping into 5% of net profits has an effect greater than some bonus packages of the management teams (less cigars to chomp!)

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Shouldn't the same logic then apply to people? Yeah, figured as much.

If you can ruin a person's entire life over a "mistake", you can definitely do the same to a company, or even better, to the decision makers at that company. Doing anything else just encourages continued bad behavior. No speculation, we have decades of observational data showing that companies and executives will do pretty much anything for a buck, legal or not.

Yeah I think many here would be fine applying the same logic to people.

How about not doing either?

It comes down to self-interest and the balance of power, not morals or human rights or any form of idealism that acts as a soft control of the masses.

Corporations are a faceless entity with tremendous power, both to harm and to benefit.

The average individual lacking comparative capital or influence has no weapon with which to fight and no gift which which to bribe.

Government, the monopolist of violence, wields its power accordingly. Why would it extinguish a benefactor when it can simply crack the whip to keep them in line and remind them of whose hand is on the whip in the first place? Whereas, the larger set of powerless individuals are handled brutally, not because it’s best but simply because it’s expedient and without consequence to the power-holder.

A secondary benefit, intentionally achieved by the most insidious of governments, is that the extinguishment of minor troublemakers removes the seeds from which a population might grow to realize their own latent power via cooperative “trouble-making”.

Government, in a democracy, is supposed to represent the choices of the people. They serve us. If they're not serving you, you are voting wrong.

If you vote for corrupt imbeciles because their sound bites align with some of your narrow interests, don't expect them stop being corrupt imbeciles when they are in power.

> …supposed to…

You’re right. But “supposed to” is just an ideal.

> …They serve us.

Do they really? The evidence suggests otherwise. So we must ask, why do they not serve us?

Leading us to…

> If they're not serving you, you are voting wrong

Well sure, in a democracy, if the representatives don’t work towards the population’s interests, then the population must be “voting wrong”.[1] But that is just begging the question…

“Why are they voting wrong?”

And sure…“They are fooled.”

But, How?

“They are fools.”

But, Why?

[1] Ignoring the problem of asymmetric information. A population simply does not a have access to all the information needed to ensure they’ll be served properly. The representatives know far more about their own intentions than any set of voters ever could.

Proper education, a corner stone of democracy (sometimes forgotten? In particular in that context). Not the full story, but for sure a critical part of it.

You might be interested in:

Disciplined Minds by Jeff Schmidt: https://ia800103.us.archive.org/22/items/jeff_schmidt_discip...

The Crisis of Democracy: https://ia800305.us.archive.org/29/items/TheCrisisOfDemocrac...

Both address the issue of education in the context of democracy and the current economic order.

The first being a proper critique and the second being from the perspective of the elites and power-holders, particularly the Trilateral Commission, helmed by Rockefeller. And its concerns and conclusions can be interpreted as being antagonistic to the goals and interests of the populace. It’s the origin of the phrase “an excess of democracy”. An “excess” according to who? one should reasonably ask…

Edit:

I says to myself, why not submit these to HN and maybe get a little discussion going?

And so I did…

Disciplined Minds: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35643885

Crisis of Democracy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35643916

Thank you for your comments and links in this thread, very interesting.

And thank you for the friendly and encouraging comment.

Great. Then I want them encouraging corporations. I don't want my power company limited to the risks that their CEO can absorb (so projects under what? 20% of the CEOs disposable wealth that the CEO will willing to risk on the total of all projects?). I want a power company that can risk creating large solar farms and absorb the lawsuits that the CEO on their own would not be willing to take on if they were bearer of so much responsibility just couldn't risk it. You are pushing for a world of all large projects being limited to those done by billionaires just like the world of peasants that existed prior to the creation of the concept of corporations. You are pushing a much worse and limited world for the little people where they can't pool their resources and do ANYTHING larger than any one individual can assume the ENTIRE risk of.

NOTE: you missed the qualifying word "illegal" in my proposal. You can continue to take all legal risks just the same as before, but all shielding disappears if/when you commit to doing illegal activities. Hold CEOs and boards directly accountable for illegal activity.

edit: went through the thread and realized I didn't make it explicit that the proposal is to go directly at executives and board only in cases of illegal activity. It was implied but not explicitly clear. Making this edit to clarify my intent.

I like the logic of that. Corporations were originally given limited liability in return for doing a public good.

If they are doing something illegal - the opposite of a public good - then they broke the deal, so those who broke the law don't get limited liability.

On a previous thread someone posted a interesting idea. Every time a company conducts criminal actions, the feds assume X percentage of undilutable ownership. This punishes the company and stakeholders (or stockholders) as it dilutes their equity and if too much illegality occurs the company changes hands (and probably gets spun out as a new public company with the proceeds going back to the public and the original investors/etc still get an acceptable punishment).

We already have this. I was in prison federal prison with some of these guys. What you want is maybe less prosecutorial discretion but mandatory sentences/etc have been ruled unconstitutional in federal law so it would be a tricky prospect when it comes to removing individualized assessments. It's easy to grab a pitchfork after reading an article but their might be realities we don't see that prosecutors (who do this for a living and really really like having scalps to hang) did.

> Government, in a democracy, is supposed to represent the choices of the people. They serve us

And most of us prefer a large and strategic employer not be obliterated over fixable sanctions violations.

"Corporations are a faceless entity with tremendous power, both to harm and to benefit."

So they should be held to an even higher standard.

>Corporations are a faceless entity

This has to change.

>> There is no reason to go into the comments of every post that shows a price of the fee a company paid in order to express why you think a company that is fined should be crippled because of it, the point is to deter people not to lay nuclear landmines for companies to be destroyed over.

> Shouldn't the same logic then apply to people? Yeah, figured as much.

Kinda sorta. There's not an exact equivalence. We don't punish every crime with the death penalty. Also, there are a lot more people than there are hard disk manufactures. "Nuking" a hard disk manufacture over a violation to deter others has a lot more downsides for the national community (let's make WD a monopoly as a deterrent?) than "nuking" a person for a violation.

The idea would be not to punish the corporation itself (a nebulous concept in any case), but to punish the decision makers that made the decision to pursue illegal profits. Fire the executives and the board, as they're the ultimate decision makers, and have the entire set replaced by a team with clearer judgement of the line between right and wrong.

This would accomplish the desired intent without perturbing the number of players in the market place.

If it's costly to the corporations, don't you think the owners would do such a thing? It's not an either or situation, but hitting them at the proper level of abstraction/let the internal "market" forces play it out.

You can't make it costly enough to the corporation without incurring undue collateral damage to a whole lot of people that had nothing to do with it. The point of is to focus the cost onto the actual decision makers responsible for the poor decision making; corporation would continue to survive, without collateral damage to employees and marketplace.

> Shouldn't the same logic then apply to people? Yeah, figured as much.

I like that you smugly answered your question for them. Tilt at the windmills and strawmen all you want I guess.

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