Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

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> Financial crimes deserve a financial penalty.

Nah. Financial crimes cause real harm. And financial penalties frequently aren't sufficient disincentive.

Imagine that I have no assets but am a good talker. So I go out an launch an "investment fund" that is just a Ponzi scheme. Let's suppose I take in $50m, pocket $10m, and spend the rest on "investment returns" and appearing to run a real business. I live high on the hog for 5 years before it all falls apart, at which point many too-trusting people have lost their lifes' savings. What is the correct penalty?

There's no way a financial penalty can be correct here because all of my money was stolen. If the government just sets me back the zero I started at, what punishment is that? Where's my disincentive to do it all again?

If anything, I'd argue financial crimes are more likely to deserve jail time. People who steal food may be doing it out of necessity. But nobody stealing millions through financial crimes can claim desperation. I don't think people who use suits to rob instead of ski masks are any less thieves.

Being raped, assaulted or having a family member murdered is worse than losing money.

Money can be repaid. You can't be unraped.

What about death as a result of money stolen from public health?

You write that in a tone of contradiction, but I don't see what in my comment contradicts that.

Rape and murder are extreme crimes and of course no financial loss is equal to them but there are other violent crimes that have less of an impact compared to losing money.

You might be thinking about someone stealing a person's TV but what about their life savings. What about a corporation that goes bankrupt because of financial misdeeds and people lose their jobs? My dad lost his job in the mid 90s and the effects on my family involved massive stress for years.

Financial concerns/economy seems to be the most important issue to voters in almost every election ever.

It's the 5th highest reason for divorce at 36% (https://www.insider.com/why-people-get-divorced-2019-1)

It can also can result in physical issues. Maybe you can't afford healthy food, maybe you can't afford health care due to financial loss.

I couldn't find statistics but I can't imagine that in cases of theft being repaid 100% or even 50% of your loss occurs that frequency (but no source so..)

In other words some financial crimes are worse than violent crimes.

I agree with your conclusion. Google News has correctly decided I'm interested in Ponzi schemes, so it shows me articles at least weekly about newly discovered large ones. A very common element is people retired or on their way who have lost everything. I'd much rather get a punch in the snoot than to spend years slowly dying of stress, poor nutrition, and patchy medical care.

Are those the only crimes that involve jail time you can think of?

We spent half a century sending people to jail for years or decades for possessing a bit of marijuana. You can be sent to jail for non-payment of speeding fines, or fishing at the wrong time of year. Or peacefully protesting government policies.

> Being raped, assaulted or having a family member murdered is worse than losing money

Violent and financial/corruption crimes are in categories to themselves.

The former for obvious reasons. The latter, because they corrode the institutions that make civilization work. Let financial crime--specifically corruption--run rampant and you'll lose more lives to riots, civil war or worse than to murder.

It's no secret that car factories in peacetime make good tanks in war. Also, in peacetime, they employ many voters and their families. Ghosn was an immensely powerful man. He used his influence for personal enrichment. Enrichment his family collaborated to defend. Kings' courtiers had strict punishments for disloyalty for a reason. Much of that was personal. But some tied to the integrity of the state.

We cannot excuse multimillionaires from running from the law while claiming to have a just society just because they had good PR. Ghosn, and his family [1], must be held accountable.

[1] his son, Anthony Ghosn, facilitated the escape [a] as did his daughter, Maya Ghosn, who is profiled in the article

[a] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nissan-ghosn-taylor-bail-...

Well if you're going to go to the extreme, how about treason?

Let's say you sell military secrets to an enemy that results in nuclear destruction of your country and deaths of millions of people. The act of exchanging that secret for money was nothing more than moving some bits around on the internet, certainly non violent itself. Would you retain this strange protection from responsibility for consequences of your action in this case as well?

Money often represents opportunity, sometimes its lack can cause significant distress. Say you want to go on vacation but find that all your bank accounts are in the red, you are not going to make that vacation, instead you are probably going to spend significant amounts of time trying to fix the resulting issues. Someone dropping by years later with a few million in hand isn't going to give you those years of your life back.

I’d imagine the penalty at least involves returning any stolen money, but a garnishment on future income and additional IRS scrutiny should do it.

I actually think jail time isn’t enough a disincentive without the financial penalty because otherwise it can just be a cost of doing business.

For example there was a chronic thief in SF that stole peoples’ laptops from cafes. She was jailed multiple times but because the police had no way of knowing where she hid the stolen goods they were still never recovered and presumably she kept her earnings even after jail time.

Oh, yeah, I totally agree that there should be financial penalties larger than the ill-gotten gains. I'm just saying that isn't enough.

There's a legal expression (it's in French originally) that says

"You can't get blood from a stone"

This effectively means financial crimes can never be repaid in full, and frequently only small percentages get repaid. It also means the government can never hope to actually do anything to help other than punishment.

Going after financial crimes to protect victims ... just doesn't work.

Somehow this is enormously at odds with people's expectation of justice, and people either just can't or refuse to believe that's really how it works.

> at which point many too-trusting people have lost their lifes' savings

People should be a little smarter and not fall for Ponzi schemes. Furthermore, many people who invest in such schemes, understand how they work but hope to get profit before it collapses.

So you’re going with victim blaming as your defense here?

> People should be a little smarter and not fall for Ponzi schemes

Blaming the victims is not a solution.

This logic can be applied to justify stopping punishing any crime (“well, they should have stayed at home if they did not want to get mugged”, “they should know better than leave their house for the week if they did not want to get burglarised”, etc).

The victim-perpetrator binary is a false dilemma. Courts recognize contributory negligence in car accidents, why shouldn't they recognize them for self-inflicted financial harms in which one was aware or should have been aware of the risks?

I'm assuming you are actually a troll, or maybe you haven't actually looked beyond the headline. Many "schemes" are very legitimate looking, offering modest returns. At the moment with very low bank deposit even a 10% investment fund is attractive. Also vulnerable often cannot distinguish good will from good acting by purveyors.

Just recently it has come to light that a crooked funeral fund here in Australia has been preying on indigenous people for years with no prospect on their deposits being returned

I don't think you understand how scams work. They're engineered so that somebody will fall for them. If we made everybody 10% smarter, scammers would just make their scams 10% cleverer.

I also think a linear "smartness" model misses it. Both intelligence and knowledge are multidimensional. Everybody has strengths and weaknesses, and well-run scams target particular weaknesses.

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