yeah seems like a great dude...
In this case, the original commenter wants to tar all centralized institutions as corrupt (congress, news, etc). His strategy is to paint Shrekli in the best possible light, to make him a martyr for the cause.
He even paints Shrekli as another Snowden:
> It exposes it. Not quite as monumental, but a Snowden moment. Remember, congress did squat about the price gouging, because that's what they get paid to do.
It sounds like he definitely lied to investors, but he apparently didn't intend to steal their money, and took pains to make sure he did not cost them money in the end. Apparently most investors in the fund that lost all it's money ended up close to tripling their investment after he worked to replace the lost money in the end.
That leaves me thinking that "up to 20 years" is a bit harsh given the facts. Hopefully the judge will take that into consideration and give him a more lenient sentence.
Obtaining a license just to increase a drug's price from $13.50 to $750 for no apparent reason other than greed isn't enough for you?
This case isn't about that. Are you suggesting we should convict and punish people on trial for one crime because we don't like their past activities and behaviors? Even if those other behaviors were illegal, they should be considered during a separate trial that's actually pertaining to them.
That wasn't your question, was it? You asked why he's human garbage, I explained why. I wasn't defending or attacking this case, I was explaining why some think he is human garbage.
> Nowhere was I (or you) saying anything about this case.
Your specific words in your original response were "He's human garbage, let him rot." That response was to me saying I think the details of the case lead me to believe that I think he should a light sentence.
You very specifically noted through that euphemism that you think he shouldn't get a light sentence in this case because he's human garbage.
Edit: Sorry. That was someone else. I was specifically asking in context, but that wasn't you originally. Mea Culpa. Leaving it here with this note so people that saw it previously can see me retraction.
This is how society's immune system functions.
I also see a distinction between Capone and Shkreli in that Capone's other actions which may have influenced his trial were myriad illegal activities that they couldn't get evidence for. Shkreli is just believed to be an asshole.
The justice system is meant to punish specific crimes, which it did done in both cases, but that doesn't prohibit you as a human to see it as karmic justice, for someone being a garbage human, wether legally or illegally.
Normally, no (which I said explicitly in another comment here). In this case, the activities are linked. There's no need to evade taxes if your income isn't illegal.
Even so, I don't subscribe to the argument that it's entirely a good thing that we prosecuted Capone for tax evasion. We were unable to prove the actual criminal activities, so we instead looked at the fruits of those activities and used that.
Another way to look at it is that the justice system completely failed initially. We couldn't build a case for the major crimes, but we could for the lesser crimes. He was still guilty of both (this is of course assuming his guilt).
In Shkreli's case, we failed to prosecute originally because it's not a crime. The current case isn't related in the same way, and linking them and punishing in the latter because of people's perception of the former is akin to levying a harsher sentence on someone because of their interracial marriage in a region and time when that was legal but frowned upon. Social pressure unrelated to the issue at hand should not be relevant in court. Even if it's related to the issue at hand in the case, it should be restricted to sentencing (where it likely can't be removed anyway).
No. It was about fraud.
Why should we NOT punish people for fraud?
The ways that question are answered in this thread prove your assertion is false. This case IS about that, because without that, he'd just be one more pennyless felon.
Who said he shouldn't be punished? I simply stated that since he made restitution prior to charges being brought, perhaps that should factor into sentencing. I don't know who you're arguing against, or what you're really arguing, but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with what I've been talking about.
Restitution isn't the only reason for punishment.
> I don't know who you're arguing against, or what you're really arguing
That he's clearly unapologetic and simply got lucky, and that this should factor into sentencing.
And it's not like anyone was hurt. Overall, insurers ended up paying a bit more (drugs are only 10-15% of US health care costs, and very few people need Daraprim). Big deal. If more people did this, then the system would get this issue addressed, maybe.
On top of that, he said he was investing the profits into researching better drugs, though of course that's not a requirement.
At some point if your system is so terribly busted and no one is fixing it, eh, maybe you lose the right to hate people abusing it. Or maybe his wit and charisma is making me blind to the issue here.
I'm getting increasingly annoyed at the culture of praising exploiters of the system instead of promoting constructive players (who are less profitable, ie less sexy). I understand that the contrarian view to "The Man" is the easiest one to take, even if I think the identified "Man" is the diametrical opposite.
If you want to make a profit and drink champagne on yachts that's totally fine, just don't go around telling everyone that you're pouring those profits back into research.
My point is fairness and accusations of greed cut both ways, if fairness was truly the concern of the poster he would also cut his standard of living in order to benefit those much worse off than him. As he more than likely does not his argument is not "let's increase fairness" but rather "people in my class and I deserve more" and that's the same argument the people raising the drug prices are making.
A USD 750 list price for a drug does NOT result in most people paying the list price. Most people get it via insurance, insurance companies pay a negotiated rate and you pay the copay (frequently higher than what the insurance company actually pays). Retrophin isn't a widely used drug so the effect on overall premiums was also tiny. His company literally offered the drug for free to anyone who for whom insurance didn't pay for it and who couldn't afford it. He also had a publicly stated business plan whereby he would use profits from Retrophin to invest in research into similar drugs which pharmaceutical companies have not been doing since Retrophin had been losing money.
Given the byzantine manner in which payments are actually made in the US, there simply isn't any other way to price an orphan drug, i.e. a drug that very few people actually need. The only way to make a business that produces life-and-death drugs needed by very few people sustainable is to price the drug very high due to very high fixed regulatory costs per drug manufactured. If you want to change this, it needs legislation and FDA reform. Demonizing businesses that raise prices to ensure they make a reasonable profit, will only result in drugs that are life-and-death for a small number of people either getting taken off the market or not coming to the market in the first place.
What's FAR more concerning is things like the recent increases in pricing for things like the Epi-Pen. Prices were raised 10x but also the expiration date on Epi-Pens is artificially short, so hospitals, schools etc are forced to throw away perfectly usable Epi-Pens for no good reason. Nobody talks about that because that price hike was by order of a senator's daughter. Shrekili just happens to be a bit of a PR nincompoop.
What we really need is a populace that thinks carefully and independently and a press that actually spends money on investigative reporting instead of relying on what politicians tell them to report, which helps their bottom line since it's much cheaper.
Yeah, but he is.
Spare me the faux "logically objective" pose. There is a reason he's known as the "most hated man in America". His actions have earned him this reputation.
Because that title sells clicks, much like every other piece of hyperbolic clickbait spewed onto the internet these days?
If he truly is the most hated man in America, by fact, then it's simply further proof that Americans, as a collective entity, are willingly at the highest extremes of ignorance.
What matters is: 1) did people lose money, due to some scam? and 2) did he do anything illegal.
This guy speaks out and maybe he is an asshole and suddenly everyone hates him. The rest keep their profits to themselves and we don't seem to care or mind.
Acknowledging the fact that what you're doing is wrong does not suddenly make that thing right. It's still wrong. And you're still an asshole for doing it.
The investors who invested all made money — by the defense’s tally, more than triple what they invested.
1: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/04/business/dealbook/martin-...
Put simply, if I burn my house down in order to collect the insurance money, I've committed insurance fraud whether or not I pay that money back, and no amount of profit on the payback negates the illegality.
It's more similar to you managing a property for someone, and telling them you got fire insurance when you haven't yet, and then when the house burns down accidentally you work to make the money to cover what the insurance would have covered. You did commit fraud by not getting the insurance when you said you would, but you also covered the costs in the end.
That said, I agree that my analogy was bad, and I wasn't trying to assert that Shkrelli deliberately set the house on fire as much as I was just looking for an appropriate analogy of something that is illegal even though it did not have any financial damages.
The point was that while damages from fraud may be financial, the fraud is the damage, and the lie is the crime.
Yeah, I was just trying to add more information to it, and point out what I thought were interesting portions of the case. Less a rebuttal and more an clarification and addition. :)
The case itself is very interesting because the situation is very interesting, and that's only compounded by his public persona, which is reviled by many because of prior media attention.
I'm not sure whether that company was the one responsible for the drug price hike, and whether that constituted a lot of the profits or that actually went back into research as I believe he said it did during that episode.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/05/merrill-lynch-salesman-descr...
fraud wrongful or criminal deception intended to result in financial or personal gain
stealing take (another person's property) without permission or legal right and without intending to return it
No, Shkreli didn't intend to steal their money since they gave it to him. However, he did in fact deceive them as to what he did with said money. So he was convicted of fraud.
Also of note, in the NY Times article[1], they call out how his defense tried to mount a defense based on the financial profit or personal gain portion of the definition.
The defense asked why Mr. Shkreli, if he wanted to commit fraud, didn’t commit fraud: He ultimately paid back his investors with shares of Retrophin, which became valuable, along with cash. His lawyers also asked how Mr. Shkreli profited, painting him as a hardworking oddball who, rather than throwing in the towel after his funds imploded, vowed to get his investors’ money back. He paid them back late, they argued, but he paid them back.
Apparently, that wasn't successful.
1: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/04/business/dealbook/martin-...
https://www.justice.gov/usam/criminal-resource-manual-949-pr...
Yes, Shkreli is probably at best guilty of being guilty. But please don't mind me at all if I enjoy this feel good item just a little more than the usual story about someone being guilty of being poor.
No, it's equating restitution and intent with lenient sentencing.
Even if I grant that he intended to defraud people initially (which doesn't appear to be the case), that's still analogous to if someone stole your car, but later had a change of conscience, returned it, and had also fixed your dents and given it a new paint job to make amends. Are they guilty of theft? Yes. Should they be punished? Probably. Should they get the same punishment as someone who stole your car and crashed it, or stole it and sold it? I don't think so. That's leniency. You may have a different opinion.
Honestly, the issue was that he's an utter asshole, including to his investors. Investors are willing to put with a lot if you triple their money, but Shkreli managed to cross that line. That made him an easy target for the prescription drugs investigation and media circus.
Suppose you lent 10,000 to a friend and the friend promised to return it within a year. A year later, your friend doesn't pay you back and makes a bunch of excuses. Instead, he takes the 5,000 he has left to the casino, gambles it on the roulette wheel and by luck manages to turn that into 30,000 and pays you back 1.5 years later. I don't think you would be happy with that situation...
> “I asked Fred where the funds had come from, and he responded, ‘The meeting with the General Dynamics board was a bust and I knew we needed money for Monday, so I took a plane to Las Vegas and won $27,000.’ I said, ‘You mean you took our last $5,000— how could you do that?’ He shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘What difference does it make? Without the funds for the fuel companies, we couldn’t have flown anyway.’ Fred’s luck held again. It was not much, but it came at a critical time and kept us in business for another week.” [0]
[0]: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/15/fred-smith-blackjac...
This isn't ok because the original investor was paid off. That's also how Ponzi schemes work - the original investors are paid off (I know, here the money seems to be generated from Retrophin, but the behavior is the same).
This gave me a perspective: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-12-17/martin-sh...
Let me add to this: Buying a company you have a government mandated monopoly on (patent) that owns a product that people will die if they don't take (inelastic demand), and has a huge barrier to entry for new, competing entrants (FDA) is conceivably less risk than throwing chips on a roulette wheel.
Shkreli may have been able to work his pseudo-Ponzi-ish scheme to investors' benefit. But it is pretty easy to look up the sordid history of the vast majority of Ponzi-type schemes, to see why this type of activity is generally illegal.
I'd be joyous if the return was better than I could expect to make otherwise, say > 10-20%.
Investments are risky. They are not automatic.
What I wouldn't be happy about is if I was lied to about the risk of an investment. That is closer to what this case is about. The money gained or lost doesn't really matter.
A. If you get caught, you're going to prison
But more importantly -
B. If, however, you work hard to ensure the people you defrauded are not harmed by your fraud, your sentence will be lighter than if you were the type of fraudster to cut and run.
I don't know about you, but in light of the fact that fraudsters are always going to exist, I'd like to incentivize the "benevolent fraudsters", rather than pretending (through equal sentencing) that there is no difference between the two.
So if everything happened identically but he failed to make them money _then_ it would be bad? I don't understand.
I have a feeling that since most people have never dealt with the justice system, they fail to appreciate just how black and white it really is. While the movies/TV do portray cases where "extenuating circumstances" help the case, most cases are pretty straightforward.
Can you elaborate on this?
I think it's nice everyone came out okay, besides Shkreli in this case I guess. I still think what he did was wrong though because if you don't punish that kind of behavior, then you're encouraging people to do things that are wrong in the hopes they will succeed, and it won't always work out as it happened to do so here.
"The investors who invested all made money — by the defense’s tally, more than triple what they invested."