Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

We need to be more like China [1]:

> China executed a dairy farmer and a milk salesman today for their role in a tainted infant formula scandal in which at least six children died and 300,000 were made ill, state media said.

Or jailing 50 steel executives for faking emissions data [2].

Fines are the cost of doing business. Jail is the only thing those responsible fear.

Take the example of Purdue and the Sackler family. This company and family is largely responsible for the opioid epidemic by knowingly lying about Oxycontin. They amde billions from it. Despite a total worth of $11 billion a court recently granted them immunity from civil lawsuits for $6 billion of that [3]. So despite killing hundreds of thousands of people, they get to keep $5 billion of that.

Be more like China. But since US corporations own the government that will absolutely never happen.

We routinely use civil asset forfeiture in this country, primarily against poor people (eg parents' house seized after son's drug bust [4]).

Personally I think it's a ridiculous perversion of justice that civil asset forfeiture isn't unconstitutional but here we are.

Every single asset of the Sacklers should be viewed as the proceeds of an intentional crime that killed many people and has had a huge cost of society. It should be seized. All of it.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/nov/24/china-executes...

[2]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-28/china-jai...

[3]: https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/30/business/sackler-purdue-opioi...

[4]: https://www.cnn.com/2014/09/03/us/philadelphia-drug-bust-hou...

They key question is whether death penalty or life sentence acts as an effective deterrent. We all heard that Chinese execute for big corruption. Does this mean China has eradicated corruption? I have my doubts (and believe me, I don’t ever jump on CCP hate train).

I think it would. Why would someone falsify data for a company if they know they might get executed. It wouldn’t be for their own gain.

Eradicate corruption? Almost certainly not. That's not really possible. The goal is largely to keep it below a certain threshold so the country can actually function.

As the death penalty, personally I'm not a fan. But I am a fan of severe punishments for the kind of intentional corporate malfeasance we're talking about.

Here's the lesson I'd like people to take from all of this: markets need strong voernments to function. Libertarianism is a fantasy with no basis in reality (eg [1]). Political movements such as "starving the beast" [2] are nothing more than an attempt to extract even more profits from the populace, even to the point where that society can no longer function because no one can afford food or housing, the drinking water is poisonous and none of the roads or bridges can be repaired.

[1]: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast

Eradicated is quite a high bar, isn't it?

I don't think any category of crime has ever been eradicated from anywhere. The question is whether China's measures reduce corruption. My bet would be yes, but who knows.

But we’re not going to introduce death penalty based on bets, right?

I'm against death penalty, not only for corruption but in general. But there's a huge spectrum between death penalty and the almost irrelevant penalties for corruption in most of the West.

Being more like China, in this case, is being hard on this kind of crime, the death penalty or life sentences isn’t germane to the conversation. Whether China eradicated corruption or not, doesn’t have bearing on whether we should have stronger responses to this kind of fraud and harm.

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