Comment by devmonk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by devmonk | Hacker News Reader

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Agreed. What if we:

- Developed and focused on a small set of specific goals for the U.S. government.

- Eliminated most of the IRS and replace our current taxes with a graduated sales tax.

- Cut the myriad of handouts to various organizations that our government makes in one form or another every year.

- Developed and supported sustainable agriculture.

- Eliminated the public education system but provided allowances such that every child can get an education tailored to their abilities and desires, and advance at their own speed rather than the speed of their class.

- Eliminated most of the FDA, DEA, and other enforcement agencies, with the exception of the FBI, and allow our judicial system to imprison employees of companies found responsible for knowledgeably harming citizens simply using trial by jury, and replace bail/monetary remedies with prison sentences only.

- Focused efforts on planetary defense and colonization of other worlds via a beefed-up NASA whose purpose is to support private space enterprise.

- Allowed individuals at businesses to be sued rather than the company itself, for which there would exist no legal entity.

Of course, they won't do these things, but since they are asking...

> - Allowed individuals at businesses to be sued rather than the company itself, for which there would exist no legal entity.

Interesting. What problem would this proposal solve?

You had this legal situation earlier in the US. The problem was, that the consumer could not pinpoint who to sue. That's a horrible incentive to make the structure of who did what in your company totally non-transparent.

But the current remedy of a non-human legal entity is that the entity can be sued and affect many people adversely who weren't responsible for the wrong.

We need a different remedy, like the ability for a citizen to sue every citizen belonging to an organization together if the organization was found responsible for the wrong. Then those citizens not responsible in that organization would have to have witnesses and documentation to prove that they were not responsible for the wrong.

And instead of sueing, I think that prison sentences would work better. Putting all responsible persons from a company into prison would get people's attention. Also, citizens and lawyers producing substantial litigation without merit would be imprisoned.

So, next time <huge company> does something wrong, someone will need to check several hundred thousand "not me" documents?

No, you would just need a document by enough people in the organization to specify who caused the issue.

For example, if a scientist knows that a drug caused a side effect that included brain damage, but chose to hide that fact through manipulation of the data to get the drug approved, and two out of four on his small team knew (were accomplices) but two were not in the know, then the two not in the know could claim innocence, and the rest of company as a whole could claim as a whole (a single document that all agree to) that the aforementioned team was responsible.

Assuming that federal investigation (FBI for example) was assisting, they could help prove the innocence of others in the company as well as the innocence of the two on the team that were unaware of cover-up. The three involved would be imprisoned.

Sounds awfully like guilty-until-proven-innocent to me...

And it makes it even more likely that the little guy gets punished instead of the executive who told him to do it (and has all of the corporate lawyers working for him).

No, "orders are orders" is not a sufficient defense. "It was my underling" isn't either.

That sounds like an absolutely awful idea. Offices are already full of CYA behavior, but if I can go to jail because another guy in my department did something wrong and I couldn't prove that I wasn't aware, I think you'd see a lot less economic activity. It would be too risky to be a part of a group. The only winners would be lawyers.

Update: I actually don't know if you had this situation earlier in the US. We had this situation earlier in Germany. I mixed up the source I read it from. (It was an introductionary book into the German law system.)

While I guess that the situation in the US was similar, I can vouch for it.

Eliminated most of the FDA

Why the FDA? It's a minuscule part of the budget and provides a service crucial to public health & safety. I figured it was one of those things almost everyone could agree on. A post-FDA world would almost certainly include "As Seen on TV" cures for cancer. Do we really want that?

I'm tentatively in favor of reevaluating the FDA, as I've argued at length elsewhere. The question to consider is whether the FDA's expensive ex-ante regulation does more good than harm when compared with cheaper ex-post liability rules, especially in light of the FDA's incentive to be more cautious than is socially optimal. I have strong doubts that the agency does more good than harm in light of the massive costs it imposes on medical research.

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