Hacker News Reader

Comment by twomoretime | Hacker News Reader

>In the absense of capital punishment for corporations

That's an interesting analogy that I've never considered, given we treat corporations as personlike entities. Why don't we have a capital punishment equivalent?

Perhaps our rules regarding social harm are too loose. But I'm not sure that I would trust a government, especially our government, to make and enforce the right rules.

In any case our legislation desperately needs to catch up to the tech. Communication has changed exponentially for the last few hundred years - printing, radio, telephone, television, cell phone, dialup, cable, smartphone, gigabit...many of our laws are simply not written for an era where decentralized communication of this bandwidth and latency is possible. Article is case in point.

View on HN

> That's an interesting analogy that I've never considered, given we treat corporations as personlike entities. Why don't we have a capital punishment equivalent?

We do, it's called charter revocation. It's basically never done any more because even though the corporate form is a privilege granted by the public, it's become essentially an unconditional gift.

It does exist. The state can cause an involuntary dissolution of your corporation [0] if circumstances dictate. That would include such things as not paying your corporate taxes.

[0] https://www.upcounsel.com/involuntary-dissolution

Corporate charters can be revoked. It doesn't happen because of the jobs factor but in theory it can be.

We punish corporations in ways which adversely impact jobs all the time, even though we don't do charter revocation.

True, but once you start applying that at the level of Facebook the jobs factor starts to really add weight.

Personally I'd much prefer executives to become automatically liable for wrongdoing by their companies.

"Why don't we"

Way too many people ask "why don't we" before figuring out what they are talking about.

Arthur Andersen got the death penalty. If you point that out, people will argue with you, no the death penalty would be something different.

It doesn't matter what you think a word or phrase means, you should have a good idea of what you mean by it before advocating it.

What? I'm identifying a need and a possible solution. Now we have a civil discussion with the goal of exchanging information.

Sorry if I sounded hostile, but I'm saying that when you use a phrase and assume everyone knows what it means just because everybody uses it, that's not identifying a solution and it's not a starting point for a discussion.

I'd love to have a discussion about the corporate death penalty, as long as it's based on some concrete idea of what it is and why it should help.

It's a topic that comes up over and over and I wouldn't even comment if I wasn't interested in something substantive and different from the norm.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com