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Comment by CrzyLngPwd | Hacker News Reader

So, in the USA, you can do wrongs and then buy your way out of it, such that doing wrong and the resulting fines are just a cost of doing business however you see fit?

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Yes, Robert Smith cured his issue by simply reversing the tax deduction for charitable contributions

Just find something that can be rationalized as value and the US will play along

If you cant: straight to jail, stay there till the trial or take a horrible plea deal that ensures your incarceration but for theoretically less time than losing at trial

After a certain threshold, financial crime is rebranded as "lobbying" and is rewarded instead of punished.

I feel you're going to have to do a bit more work to explain why this lobbying -> reward, vs. crime -> financial penalty, analogy makes sense.

Financial crime can't exist truly hidden in the modern world. Someone always know about it happening. So bribing those in the know is an integral part of the financial crime. And at certain scale bribes get to be renamed as lobbying, while being in essence the same bribes. Bribes are illegal, but lobbying is not, that's what the reward is. Corporation get to legalize their ill gotten money and have no problems with the law.

You don't want to pay capital gains taxes, so you lobby that it is legal to separate obviously unified entity into on-shore bankrupt one, and off-shore profitable one in Ireland or whatever, bribed politicians make it a law and suddenly no taxes are required. You have a chicken farm for which you don't want to pay for extremely expensive utilization of the ill and dead birds, so you lobby to reduce some restrictions written in law and voila, now you can dump your dead birds at a common garbage dump. These are just some illustrative examples.

But they haven't legalised their behavior... if they were to continue doing it, the fine and punishment goes up - it doesn't become a cost-of-business you can just eat going forward.

Also CZ has just stepped down and will be getting legally charged now.

> you can do wrongs and then buy your way out of it

Did you miss the part where they're still wanting to criminally charge Zhao?

I don't know why you're being downvoted, because the answer is mostly yes.

If you're rich enough you can even buy laws via "lobbying". Some politician voted in by the people tries to regulate you? Send in the lobbyists to introduce some "reasonable exceptions" into the law text.

Hell if you're rich enough you get to enforce US laws in foreign nations. Reading the US trade office reports is seriously disgusting to me. "Stakeholders" this, "stakeholders" that.

Sounds like freedom to me :D

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