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Comment by itsoktocry | Hacker News Reader

>A certain founder should be doing some hard time for ludicrous claims over the past 8 years.

I don't think "hard time" is appropriate for white collar crimes. Money is how you speak to these people. Martha Stewart is still worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

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Hard time costs humans the same amount whether they're rich or poor - insofar as the justice system is equally accessible and you can't just lawyer your way out if wealthy or get screwed by a disinterested public defender if poor, of course.

Money is amoral. It quickly becomes a calculation of ROI to violate the law. We've been reluctant for some reason to index fines against the wealth of the offender, but what would be a ruinous fine for a poor person is irrelevant to a wealthy person (eg. $1000 gag order violations). Also, the wheels of justice turn inexorably but slowly, and if first-to-market matters a lot with new there may be no fine that could restore things to the way it should have been if everyone acted within the law.

>Money is amoral. It quickly becomes a calculation of ROI to violate the law.

You're describing the current system.

Strongly disagree with both claims. Fraud of a sufficient degree causes harm at a scale that is equivalent (in economic terms at least) to the consequences of murder. And jail time absolutely speaks to wealthy people, given the amount of money and effort wealthy people will spend defending themselves to avoid it.

>Fraud of a sufficient degree causes harm at a scale that is equivalent (in economic terms at least) to the consequences of murder.

This is ridiculous, practically and morally.

Someone losing their life is far worse than a billion people being defrauded of $10 each, regardless of how the economists decide to value a human.

Disagree. First, it wouldn’t be $10 split evenly amongst a billion people, some people would end up losing significantly more than others. Second, we can’t speak to the real world consequences of massive fraud in this particular case yet, but in the case of the Bernie Madoff fraud, multiple people are known to have killed themselves as a result of their loss, so we can only assume similar outcomes here.

What’s money when you have billions? Isn’t jail worse then? I’d be prepared to pay a very large amount if it meant I could avoid going to jail. There is a much much much smaller amount (if any) of jail I’d accept in return for money.

>What’s money when you have billions?

You take the billions.

No but that what I mean, I have nowhere near billions and I’d be prepared to pay much more money to avoid going to jail than I’d be prepared to spend in jail (time wise) to keep all my money.

Therefore, I’d think losing money hurts less than spending time in jail no matter how much or how little money you have.

If someone steals something, taking the thing they stole back is of course the first step.

Other than that, the next step depends on what you think the point of the court/prison system is. If the point of the system is to prevent criminals from harming people: white collar criminals do crime at scale. They can hurt many more people than blue collar criminals.

If the point is to reform people, it seems like white collar criminals have an easier time lying to themselves and justifying their actions, because they don’t physically take things from people, it’s all very abstract. So that seems like a harder project that might take longer.

If the point is to prevent others from following their example, there are lots of reasons to punish white collar criminals more harshly. Their crimes are more difficult to work out, so getting caught might be harder. Plus there’s less of a de-facto preventative aspect—with blue collar crimes, depending on the crime, there’s likely a chance the victim might be physically present and quite irate, so they might fight, potentially even kill, the culprit.

Of course there are some reasons that blue collar crimes can be more serious (muggers might physically hurt somebody). But I don’t think hard time is inappropriate in either case.

The size of white collar crimes, measured in financial damage, and the large number of victims of many white collar crimes, not to mention the damage to the economy, institutional reputation, etc. makes a car theft ring that would get 10 years look like piffle.

Force those responsible to eat the cost of providing partial refunds to people who bought full self drive based on false claims.

I'm not sure Martha Stewart actually did "hard time" - she spent what, a few months in jail? Try 10-20 years.

I'm also not arguing for against jail time for white collar crimes, just disputing that she specifically did hard time. Maybe the FTX guy or Enron guys are more appropriate for a comparison.

> I'm not sure Martha Stewart actually did "hard time" - she spent what, a few months in jail? Try 10-20 years.

From what I recall of studies, and also from what I've heard from criminal defense lawyers, sending someone to jail for even very short amount of times is likely to have a meaningful effect on their behavior. Even sending a white-collar defendant to jail for a few hours can win a lot of cooperation from them; and studies seem to indicate that there's no meaningful difference between a year in prison and 20 years in prison.

The issue is the fines aren't a big deterrence as they're not that big. A lot of fines are less than the money the company made or saved with the illicit activity so it just becomes a line item cost more than an actual penalty.

>The issue is the fines aren't a big deterrence as they're not that big.

So make them big?

What would you and/or society gain if Musk goes to jail for 10 years? Another mouth to feed in prison, while he continues to accrue wealth in off-shore accounts.

Can we legally get fines large enough that it would actually hurt Musk or people of his economic stratum financially? The Supreme Court has put some pretty hard limits on civil damages awards over the years and they've just gotten more business friendly since those courts.

Hard time seems much more severe than fines and penalties, and the damages caused are much more severe than petty theft (which gets you jail time.) it seems totally appropriate to jail these people to me.

>it seems totally appropriate to jail these people to me.

Yes, people would rather see their enemies punished versus solutions that can actually benefit people, that much is clear by these comments.

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