Comment by BrenBarn
13 days ago
In my conception, part of the corporate death penalty would be personal asset forfeitures and prison time for individuals who knew or should have known about the malfeasance.
13 days ago
In my conception, part of the corporate death penalty would be personal asset forfeitures and prison time for individuals who knew or should have known about the malfeasance.
In these cases, what is prison time going to accomplish that a severe enough monetary remedy would not? Putting someone in a prison cell is a state power (criminal remedy). I think that is a useful distinction generally, and a power that should be employed only when legitimized through some government process which has a very high bar (beyond a reasonable doubt, criminal rules of evidence, protections against self incrimination etc), as it deprives someone of their physical liberty.
It strikes me that if you also appreciate this distinction, then your remedy to corporations that have too much power is to give the government even more power?
Personally, I would like to see more creative solutions that weaken both government and corporations and empower individuals to hold either accountable. I think the current gap between individuals and the other two is too severe, I'm not sure how making the government even more powerful actually helps the individual. Do you want the current American government to be more powerful? Would your answer have been different last year?
I do not see any equivalence between corporate power and government power. The population as a whole controls government power. Corporate power is constrained only by government power. I think one of the most pernicious notions in our society is that the idea that "the government" is something separate from ordinary people.
Of course, our current government has a lot of problems, but that doesn't mean I don't want the government to have power. I just want it to have power to do what the population actually wants it to do (or, perhaps, what the population will actually be happiest with).
What would be your proposed mechanism for empowering individuals? How would such a mechanism not ultimately rely on the individual leveraging some larger external power structure (like a government)? I think if we want to empower all individuals roughly equally (i.e., not in proportion to their wealth or the like), then what we wind up with is something I'd call a government. Definitely not the one we have, but government nonetheless.
It's a fair rejoinder, except I think it mixes idealism about government for realism. In reality, the government becomes an entity unto itself. This is a universal problem of government. Democratic institutions are themselves supposed to be a check on this impulse. However, as you are aware these are not absolute. A check that foresees a need to restrain government also sees a need to empower the government to restrain people.
I think however when we acknowledge that men are not angels, and that therefore government itself is dangerous merely as a centralization of power, then no, you cannot simply say well government is supposed to be of a different type of power than corporations. Because again, in reality this is often not the case. This is why several of the American founders and many of those who fought in that revolution also became anti federalists or argued against constitutional ratification.
I don't know what the answer is, but I don't think there has ever been a situation where it is accurate to say the population as a whole controls the government. In practice it doesn't work that way, and is about as useful as saying well the market controls corporations. I think something more like anti federalism could use a renaissance... the government should be weak in more cases. Individuals should be empowered. A government power to hold a corporation accountable could then rest on simply its strict duty to enforce a civil remedy. That is of a different nature than the government deciding on its own who (and more importantly - who not) to prosecute.
But I appreciate your push back, there are indeed no easy answers.
1 reply →
Bullshit. I have no control whatsoever over the government. It is completely separate from me. I have 1000x more power over Amazon by my ability to choose to not buy from them than my vote gives me over government bureaucracy. That's why whenever I have a problem with an Amazon order it is resolved in minutes when I contact support. Good luck if you have a problem with the government.
7 replies →
> prison time for individuals
Corporal punishment exists for individuals too.
Perhaps it should be on the table for executives (etc) whose companies knowingly caused the deaths or other horrific outcomes for many, many people?
This is what China does. The problem is that the application is a little, uh, selective. As soon as you get any kind of corruption it becomes a power play between different factions in the elites.
You can't do any of this without a strong, independent, judiciary, strongly resistant to corruption. Making that happen is harder than it sounds.
And it still won't help, because the perps are sociopaths and they can't process consequences. So it's not a deterrent.
The only effective way to deal with this is to bar certain personality types from positions of power.
You might think that sounds outrageous, but we effectively have that today, only in reverse. People with strong moral codes are actively excluded from senior management.
It's a covert farming process that excludes those who would use corporate power constructively rather than abusing it for short-term gain.