Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway5752 | Hacker News Reader

I honest do not understand your point. What is confusing about corporate vs individual liability? The corporation (Uber) will be held accountable at a civil level and employees can and do get held accountable at criminal levels (and that is also possible at this point). All this "let's frog-march the execs" talk because "if I did X I'd be in jail now" stuff is tiresome. I honestly do not think you understand the law well enough. Perhaps you should be upset over the enforcement of the law (which has been repeatedly and intentionally gutted in multiple areas of regulation by a major political party in the US). But that is a social and cultural problem, not a problem with the legal entity of a corporation.

View on HN

Potato Potato.

The law is written such that the corporations can do more with less accountability than people.

The law is enforced such that the corporations can do more with less accountability than people.

It seems like a very small difference at this point.

It just seems that corporations can commit crimes with far less disincentives (i.e. punishments) than people.

> corporations can commit crimes with far less disincentives (i.e. punishments) than people

And that's exactly by design. Wealthy people own corporations and pay lobbists to stay above the law.

Lobbyists, by definition, are used to try to influence legislation (i.e. shape laws), not avoid prosecution once laws have been broken.

Actually, I'd add that this is more related to the importance of the individual or company as a node in the country's economic network.

The larger the impact on the network in terms of either magnitude or volume of souls owned, the greater the ability to get away with actions that forward individual gain over general good.

Shareholders and directors of many corporations do get prosecuted.

The disincentive for the government is always going to be the effect of removing an important node from a network. Especially when the government and people gain from the stability of the network, even if certain negatives happen.

Not to say the way we treat corporations isn't really horrible. It is. Adam Smith would roll in his grave if he knew we were justifying our corporatocracy on his writings.

I'm simply pointing out that large nodes are always treated differently because it is logical to do so. If 3 people do something and you take them out, the economy keeps up exactly the same.

But take out the head of a company that owns... er... hires 100,000 souls? Or maybe the company only hires 300 souls, but they are developing nuclear bombs, or maybe developing a new gene editing tech, or green fuel? Then we have magnitude instead of volume. You got yourself political backlash if you remove these nodes.

that's called cowardice and is used as justification all the time, but that doesn't make it right or even rational. in fact, there is no reason to believe the economy won't be stronger through the failure of corporations and holding directors and exectives accountable.

proponents of the banking bailout used this same rationale, that allowing big banks to fail would lead to economic collapse, but that was only the rationale, not the reason for that course of action. bernanke, paulson & geithner were instead worried about blowback to their careers and economic futures, because it would be their friends in high places taking the hit.

if some large banks had failed, most certainly other economic actors would have swooped in to pick up the pieces and resume business. these were lucrative, real assets after all. the danger was not in economic collapse, but in how long the rebound would take, and more pointedly, the effect on bernanke and friends' careers.

we retard progress and innovation if we don't hold institutions accountable and allow them to fail. bankruptcy is the mechanism we use to allow instutions (and people) to bounce back quickly from failure, so they can use their learnings to try another tactic.

My comment was on why governments don't intervene as quickly when detecting bad behavior from important nodes. This applies to the US as to the other countries. I seem to remember a quote from some Russian book I read that went along the lines of "we crucify small thieves and celebrate the big ones".

Your comment on the bailout is something I agree with. Using a non-intervention consideration to justify intervention... has nothing to do with the validity of the non-intervention consideration.

I find it a very odd tangent to use as a reply, since it sounds like a rebuttal but doesn't address the point. It does add to it, in a way, I guess.

> employees can and do get held accountable at criminal levels (and that is also possible at this point)

What? American employees never get held accountable for white collar crime in startups

Every startup I was a part of in America was engaged in fraud, and the co-founders would laugh about it in front of employees

Did you report it? If not, do you understand you are complicit in the problem?

That's naive to think it would change anything. The investors certainly don't want to know and the police don't care. At least in USA

Individual liability carries both criminal and civil penalties, with the criminal prosecution generally making up the bulk of the work.

Corporate liability only carries civil penalties, even when the corporation's behavior is well over the line of a constructive mens rea. A harmed individual is left trying to prove an essentially novel case against a well-funded company - compared to the criminal system where most defendants are presumed guilty and eagerly prosecuted by the state.

If an individual modified their car to develop self-driving software, and the car hit and killed someone, that person would likely be sitting in jail for gross negligence. Uber's insurance carrier will pay out, push Uber to do some "internal reforms", and the actual people responsible for the poor culture won't be affected. That is the double standard people are bemoaning.

You have missed the distinction between not understanding the law, and understanding it perfectly well and disagreeing with it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com