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Yikes.
this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
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Doing good does not absolve you of having done evil.
Zuck has utterly failed in preventing facebook from doing clear, preventable, harm.
I don't get to walk free, no matter how many homeless people I feed, if I kill one.
The same should go for corporations. If they do evil, once, they should done. Not fined. There is no math which makes the bad that facebook does, necessary to achieve the good it does.
You kinda just gutted 99% of corporations. And done overall nothing for society because they already all reopened under different names.
Why are you assuming the legal framework for ending corporations couldn't have mechanisms to prevent that?
For example, offending corporations could be broken up, and have their assets sold to their competitors. The resulting money used as severance for the employees, who didn't necessarily do anything wrong.
A company can't just "start back up" if you take all their capital. And no-one would re-invest in people known for taking legal risks that might make that investment go "poof".
And 99% of corporations wouldn't be evil if it wasn't fucking legal, and basically required to compete!
I don't think it's even legal to give away a company's assets without their consent, be they criminal or not.
And anyway, that's easy to get around that too. Full of companies that already """go bankrupt""" to avoid paying their due and then reopen with money magically appearing from "somewhere". In the end to me it just seems the more rules/laws you add, the more the average person will suffer because of it while not really causing any for assholes.
"This thing would be illegal" is a pretty shit argument when changing the law is on the table.
And I see you're a fan "anti-regulation" ideals. Did it occur to you that this system could entirely replace a shitload of micro-managing bs current regulation? And did you miss the part where re-investment in criminals wouldn't be a thing if it was that expensive? The only reason it happens right now is because it is technically legal, and cheap.
It's not just changing the law of a country though, I'm pretty sure some degree of private property is in the Human Rights and would require changing international law. Not to mention it would open a whole another can of worms.
And by the way, I wasn't talking about re-investment, more like those CEOs funneling all of their money into some backwards fund or hiding it with fake IDs, You can't accurately seize assets if those "assets" can be hidden or saved somewhere else. They just pass off as bankrupt, lose their debt and get buck in business with the same money they had before.
Are you seriously trying to argue that corporations should be allowed to get away with harming humans, because human rights? We're not discussing the current system, were discussing what would be the most fair. Is this really the take you want to go with?
Some places execute criminal people, why should criminal organisations be any different? With those, there doesn't even have to be any actual killing involved. But you think its untenable because it would harm the people who own it, and benefited from the crime?
The only reason hiding personal wealth in that way is possible, is because government lets it happen, mostly because the people making the laws, do it too.
That should obviously stop.
The issue is that it's a slippery slope. When you start taking human rights away from one group of people, it could very easily lead to innocent people, or entire groups, being framed and legally stripped of their possessions. That's why I think opening that can of worms is a bad idea.
And it's not that easy. People figured hundreds of ways to hide wealth and there's no way you can regulate them all. Split it between relatives, buy non-quantifiable assets, hell they could buy bitcoins with multiple proxies on the dark web from an old pc in the middle of Africa and we'd know absolutely nothing of that. Unless you build some sort of utopic database which documents every living person's possessions and the exchange between them, it's just not possible.
What exactly is your point?
That because it would be difficult to get right, we shouldn't try?
Isn't that true for most things worth doing?
I just think giving the government a legal way to close down corporations and seize their assets doesn’t set a good precedent and could do more harm than good.
In contrast, I think having fines that actually matter and laws more strict on what a site can do without permission from the user are easier to do and have overall less ways to be exploited.
That's why limited liability is bullshit. You make the decisions, you go to prison for the crimes that come of them.
It's kind of a gray area though. Do you just jail the CEO if a company does evil? What if it was someone else inside the company and the CEO didn't know? And conversely, what if the CEO knew and is trying to pass off like they didn't, how do you prove it? It turns into slippery slopes pretty fast.
My personal solution would be just to actually scale up the fines. If someone gets fined for something they profited from, it's extremely stupid for the fine to be less than their profit. You're basically telling them to do it again.
I mean, aren't CEOs massive pay justified because they supposedly take on ultimate responsibility for the company?
If a company does something criminal under their watch, then even if they didn't give the orders they have been criminally negligent - surely?
Now, mind, I don't think that they should necessarily be the person punished most - the person's down the chain more responsible should serve more time. But the person at the top shouldn't get away free.
Regardless though I agree - fines with teeth are the most important thing.
I mean, aren't CEOs massive pay justified because they supposedly take on ultimate responsibility for the company?
If a company does something criminal under their watch, then even if they didn't give the orders they have been criminally negligent - surely?
Now, mind, I don't think that they should necessarily be the person punished most - the person's down the chain more responsible should serve more time. But the person at the top shouldn't get away free.
Regardless though I agree - fines with teeth are the most important thing.