Punishing crimes isn’t about demonstrating authority, it’s about creating incentives against committing those crimes. If anything, the message the US tends to give is that corruption is an acceptable cost of doing business.
Which can only happen if the punishments are consistent and non discriminatory.
> the message the US tends to give is that corruption is an acceptable cost of doing business.
"You won't be murdered on a technicality." Is actually a really great shore investment pitch.
So.. "you won't be murdered to cover up state incompetence." If you like.
But you can't just invest your way in a successful fraud, in either system. You generally need to also have the political machine protecting you, otherwise the thing will eventually unravel, and 'your' plunder might get clawed back.
Some might believe it is, but at its core society leverages punishment because it's a convenient outlet for socially sanctioned sadism, and it's wired to believe this measured malignance is beneficial in some capacity. Reasons and justifications (pun intended) vary wildly from person to person, implying that it's all post hoc justification. We punish crimes because it's what the people before us did, and they did it because it's what the people before them did, and so on. To say it's about anything is to miss the point, it's pararational monkey behavior. Implying more than that is to give ourselves too much credit, frankly. Or at the very most delves into evopsych sophistry.