What if, and hear me out, execs could go to jail instead of just their company paying fines as if they're parking tickets? Would they still be as cocky?
You want to send an executive to jail for cancelling a contract?
I’d be curious for a jurisdiction to try this. In my opinion, I wouldn’t want to do business in a place where commercial disputes can be twisted by a political insider into jail time.
And that's rather the point. Apple earns a lot of money in the EU and much of that seems to be through abusing their position.
So yes, if you're the executive who signs off on something that is so clearly anticompetative, you should own the penalty. Ignorance of the law is not a defense.
That, or leave.
It changes the risk appetite, sure, but that’s the point.
Anything you do —atomically legal or not— becomes illegal if it smothers the chance of competition by using you market dominance.
The thing I'm arguing here is that the person taking those decisions faces consequences.
No - you seem to be assuming such a law would only be invoked in cases where the company legitimately did something wrong. But that's not what's at stake here. We're talking about what happens when someone with political clout and a vendetta is able to use that law to wrongfully get a a CEO tossed in prison. Because sometimes laws get twisted for personal gain, and you're raising the stakes pretty high.
I wouldn't want to do business under those conditions, not because I might violate the law, but because it could be used wrongfully against me.
Yes, and we do. That’s well below the threshold of commercial disputes.
It’s much better for a shareholder too, as I for example don’t want to pay with my money for ceo’s ego trips.
Sort of good and sort of bad - some percentage of the time this would lead to zero money changing hands as the executive is bankrupt or has no assets.
I agree with this, and it could be constructed out of shareholder rights. Perhaps it could only be applied past a certain threshold of compensation, say, 100x the median wage. ($4.6mm [1].)
I’d argue the threshold should be final, unappealable regulatory penalty or criminal conviction of the corporation.
[1] https://usafacts.org/data/topics/economy/jobs-and-income/job...
Why does the concept of personal responsibility for decisions insult you so deeply?
If you believe figurative and actual violence are identical, this analogy makes sense.
Again, why does personal responsibility for harm to others bother you?
Personal responsibility is irrelevant. You’re constructing a lower threshold for criminality. I know the first thing I’d be trying to figure out is how to put my competitors in jail.
Let’s take Epic v Apple. Epic went to court. It lost. This entire saga has cost Epic’s shareholders billions. Should Sweeney go to jail? Would the world be better if an Apple-friendly prosecutor could take up that challenge?
If we have a cultural failing in America, it’s having a reflexive urge to turn outrage into jail time.
Provide an incentive for companies to regulate each other! Let rational self-interest clean up the market while the state steps back and looks on!
Do you think there is a reason every modern democracy resists privatising criminal prosecution? (They had it in Rome. We probably need a history of law section in the basic high-school curriculum.)
We already have private enforcement of many rules. Environmental ones, for example. We’re specifically discussing criminality, putting people in jail.
This is a bogus modernist interpretation that dilutes the meaning of violence. Fortunately, it’s being rejected after having a moment that peaked during lockdown.
How should this be treated? Fining the company for someone’s actions that caused deaths doesn’t seem enough.
[0] https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3253705/c...
I think you'd rather prefer Sunday gala of past where convict would be covered with oil soaked rags and then set on fire. So while that person ran crying, howling it provided tons of entertainment to hardworking folks gathered there. And in that process of course justice prevailed.
This is what one call win-win proposition.
My response to that is: we should change the laws.
Nobody ever asks this question thinking about multi-generation family businesses where the executive is the head of household and if everything works out, the business will be passed down to their progeny.
Of course, it also begs the question why do we accept this?
I fail to see the difference?