Comment by autoexec
2 days ago
> Bigger the company the more power they have to dictate the purchasing price from producers and the cost for consumers.
That wasn't always true. The Robinson-Patman Act made it illegal to give preferential treatment to large retailers specifically in order to prevent what we're seeing with walmart and amazon today. The US just stopped enforcing the law (and also anti-trust laws that would have protected local/small businesses) so here we are. At any point the US could decide that enough is enough and fix the situation but we'd probably have to make it actually illegal for corporations to bribe government officials before it stands a chance of happening.
It used to be illegal to bribe. Used to... Make a law impossible to enforce, and you suddenly transform the act to a totally legal one, at the expense of people losing trust in the system (specifically the U.S. Supreme Court and Congress). And at some point, the system breaks.
[flagged]
> altering your stance on a given position to maximize donations you'd collect
Money exchanged to alter the conduct of a person in position of power... That sounds familiar. I wonder if there's a name for that?
"Bribe: money or favor given or promised in order to influence the judgment or conduct of a person in a position of trust"
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bribe
10 replies →
There are "bribes" and then there are "bribes as recognized by the law".
We all know bribes happen, but for the law to recognize a bribe as a bribe basically requires the two parties to have a signed and notorized legal document statating that they are knowingly entering into a quid pro quo, and that both parties are aware it's illegal to do so. Anything less than this, and it will never be prosecuted.
Lobbying involves quid-pro-quo: You pass the bill we wrote for ourselves and we give you a cushy consulting job when you leave Congress.
2 replies →
But anything more than 1 vote assigned for your usage is quid pro quo (since you will get to enjoy policies that you "paid" for) when others only get a single vote.
>The Robinson-Patman Act made it illegal to give preferential treatment to large retailers specifically in order to prevent what we're seeing with walmart and amazon today.
Price collusion is illegal too, but happens all the time. There being a law for it just makes the rare fine a cost of doing business.
Not if the penalty is severe enough. Mass murder is also illegal and we make sure we don't have repeat offenders.
I wish that were true, but mass murderers like Johnson & Johnson, DuPont, Philip Morris, the Sackler family, etc. are allowed to keep on killing people and face no meaningful consequences for the deaths they cause. With enough money you can be a serial killer for decades and get away with it.
Corporate punishments can be applied on a fine grain. Every store, every instance, every choice becoming a 10k fine can rapidly make even relatively rare acts untenable as a cost of doing business.
There's too many people here voting against regulation and enforcement, to their own detriment. They have no idea what they're actually doing, they're just run on propaganda from the greedy.
> That wasn't always true. The Robinson-Patman Act made it illegal
"Legality" has never stopped big companies from doing these things. Google, Apple, Meta, etc has been receiving fines all day long and they still continue what they do.
Fines don't scale. The Australian mining company, fined a thousand bucks for every native rock drawing they destroy? They counted them up, paid the fine, and blasted a road through. All gone.
Fines becomes a business calculation. Not a deterrent, not if it matters to the big corporation. Which at some scale, it will become cost-effective.
Fines should be percentage of stock price. Applied to the owners of stock. Next time there is dividend or stock is transacted fine is collected. Still limits the liability to price of stock, but fully incentives stock owners to make sure the leadership will do their best to avoid fines.
I once saw a meme of a quote somewhere that said "if the only penalty for a crime is a fine, then it's only a deterrent for poor people" or something to that effect.
I suppose it scales upward infinitely.
A "fine" or "tax" is not necessarly regulation, in that it can be avoided, as in paid for by other actions, or gamed. Regulation should be though of as an input to cause a result in a scenario. Work backwards from the desired result, accounting for gaming the system, to attempt a regulation action. Of course, politicians are motivated only to provide something, not to make it effective.
> Fines don't scale. The Australian mining company
There's the problem. Australia doesn't scale... not the fines.
In Australia, there are a lot of rules, a lot of fines but not much to gain.
I imagine a world sometimes where punitive measures reflect the scope of crimes. If steal from a person is 1 year, then stealing from 1000 is 10 years and from a million is a lifetime. That’d put the end to political shenanigans, in my imagination.
Our legal system would rather do just about anything than bring companies to court. Unless they're, like, giving people HIV. And even then it's reluctant.
As someone proposed on here, instead of fines, punishment should be a percentage government ownership stake. This serves to 1. dilute the shares, punishing the people who can affect change (the shareholders) and 2. Put the government on the inside, a major pain in the ass and a stronger position for the government to know when, prevent, and/or punish these things in the future.
An irredeemable company/ownership will ultimately lose control over time.