If anybody just gets a speeding ticket and includes that in the price of their product, how can the system self correct?
Otherwise you’re effectively making companies illegal.
It's more like making illegal behaviour by companies to be illegal.
There's a disconnect where behaviour that would result in jail time for people, doesn't result in jail time if performed by companies and that seems wrong to me. If an individual poisons a water supply, they're not going to be getting just a fine.
There a orders of magnitude more candidates for CEOs positions than there are jobs, so it's not like we would run out of people to do the job if we increased the responsibilities.
If a company doesn't have liability for upper management, then where's their incentive to not instruct employees to behave illegally?
It would certainly make megacorps non-viable, but I don't see why that is undesirable. If the average company size is scaled down to the level where such liability is actually manageable, it would also largely solve the problem with monopolies, so it's a win-win.
This is the part of the previous comment to which I was responding, giving just one example of how it's not the case. Limited Liability corporations protect business owners of all wealth levels. Just correcting a patently false claim.
I understand your concern about thread topic, but it's just not really applicable to my point above.
The person they were replying to and to which their point related to, was very much narrowing down and exaggerating corporate entities to a "small group of people" of the "wealthy and elite".
While these larger corporations limit larger amounts of liability, most people can create a business and have it as a company, giving them limited liability. Yes, large corporations have the money and resources to better limit their liability than a smaller corporation.
They weren't disagreeing with that person, but providing a more balanced view in which liability limitations benefit companies of all sizes, not just larger ones.
The problem is that in cases like these it's extremely difficult to prove such a thing, especially considering it's over many decades and potentially dozens of people.
There's also a bit of practical concerns where criminal prosecutions don't want to pick cases that are tough to win as it'll be resource intense to pursue them.
Of course like the Volkswagen situation you reference (in Germany) where the corporation operates may impact criminal prosecution.
Im not sure of the payment timeline or if they have insurance, but it seems likely this will wipe out a few years of profitability and may force the sale of business units.
That said, I do think personal culpability is probably a better incentive and more ethically reasonable depending on the circumstances. Though that’d have to be criminal neglect, using laws we probably already have. In other words, this is a civil penalty, not the same as a criminal case with higher burdens of proof and motives need to be established.
this will wipe out a few years of profitability
During the first six months of 2023, as a result of ongoing review and recent developments in ongoing environmental matters and litigation (including the proposed PWS Settlement), the Company increased its accrual for PFAS-related other environmental liabilities by $10.3 billion and made related payments of $38 million. As of June 30, 2023, the Company had recorded liabilities of $10.9 billion for “other environmental liabilities.” These amounts are reflected in the consolidated balance sheet within other current liabilities ($0.3 billion) and other liabilities ($10.6 billion). The accruals represent the Company’s estimate of the probable loss in connection with the environmental matters and PFAS-related matters and litigation described above. The Company is not able to estimate a possible loss or range of possible loss in excess of the established accruals at this time.As the OP said, The original people responsible made bank and retired. The original shareholders cashed out. this does not encourage anything.
So, one could make the case that the workers get punished by the board of directors' bad decisions.
In fact, without something like criminal penalties, why would the board encourage safer/legal business practices? Seems like they might equally say, well that was a good run now find us another dastardly product that can bring our prices back down to our competitors.
In addition to that, is their obligation to pay their profits or to make whole a world soaked in forever chemicals? Because the latter would be way more than 12 billion.
1) bankruptcy is a thing, and
2) that period exceeds the lifespan of not only those responsible, but also any kids they might have conceived in extreme old age, and people can just… choose not work for (or invest in) a company that's been stuck with a long-term obligation.
I can see how it would be possible to make criminal liability stick on all members of a chain of command, corporate or otherwise, responsible for some decision. I can't see how setting a multi-lifetime punishment could possibly work.
Students loans, famously, can’t be discharged in bankruptcy, and follow you your entire life.
Should we have one set of law for the capital class and another for mere peasants?
I don't necessarily agree with this system, as an 18 yr old probably does not have the life experience to make such large financial decisions, and I think perhaps far fewer people should go to college for things of no economic value, but the system has logic to it. It's meant to benefit the "peasants". Rich people don't need student loans and can pay for their kids' degrees.
Fines aren't the same. A company only has so much money. Many of the owners of the company are pensions funds, etc., that are held by the middle class. You can't reasonably squeeze money from everyone who had an ETF that contained 3M. You need to allow corporations to file bankruptcy to have a healthy economy, in fact, America's bankruptcy laws are (according to some economists) one of the reasons we have such a strong economy.
Ideally, of course, the initial capital should also include the personal wealth of all the top management personally responsible for this.
> Many of the owners of the company are pensions funds, etc., that are held by the middle class. You can't reasonably squeeze money from everyone who had an ETF that contained 3M.
And why not? Do you not see how this kind of system is deliberately engineered to produce pushback under just such a pretense by, effectively, diluting and spreading responsibility wide enough across society? OTOH if we stop taking the "ohnoes, it will hurt all those middle class investors" argument seriously, it would actually encourage people to invest ethically instead of just blindly giving their money to whichever random sociopath offers the highest return.
(And yes, I do have considerable personal investments of my own.)
Because the biggest voting block in many democracies is the pensioners, so this being possible is a good way to lose elections.
> Do you not see how this kind of system is deliberately engineered to produce pushback under just such a pretense by, effectively, diluting and spreading responsibility wide enough across society? OTOH if we stop taking the "ohnoes, it will hurt all those middle class investors" argument seriously, it would actually encourage people to invest ethically instead of just blindly giving their money to whichever random sociopath offers the highest return.
Everything I have seen in my life leads me to think that people are pretty blind to risks when you dangle the possibility of a large return in front of them. Ponzi schemes, Brexit, lotteries, wars, unrestricted AI — at every scale, people will enthusiastically go for all of them in the name of some hoped-for benefit and call you names if you point out the risks they're taking.
Imagine you would write ‘white people are the biggest voting block’ - this would be questionable as a justification for bad policy, right?
So kids are brutally held responsible for their bad decision, but pensioners aren’t.
It has become so normal to denigrate and mistreat the younger generation you don’t even consciously notice it any more. It’s a form of discrimination just like any other
"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch" — Probably not Franklin
"[d]emocracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried." — Churchill
The Rules for Rulers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs&t=1025s&pp=ygUNa...
If you can fix this, please go into politics, the world would be much better if someone can actually resolve this kind of issue.
And here's the thing. If the overall arrangement continues to be broken - increasingly so, in fact - for new generations, and meanwhile they are repeatedly told that there's no way to fix it through the existing political system, at some point they will just get fed up and say, "fuck you and your system then", and it'll be torches and pitchforks time, elections be damned. Which is unlikely to actually improve matters on the whole - it rarely does - but it will certainly hurt all those older people with investments (and really just about anything of substantial value, including real estate) a great deal more than anything I talked about earlier.
So it is very much in their - in our! - interest to find some way forward that does not involve this kind of activity before the anger grows beyond the point where it can be contained. I would rather give up some of what I have to keep the rest of it. And then there's the very real risk of physical violence; the guys on the very top of this pyramid can afford private security and private jets as the ultimate escape hatch (and they're already digging bunkers for themselves elsewhere in droves), but I sure don't.
2) When a corporation goes bankrupt, it can get dissolved. This is the corporate equivalent of the death penalty, which you may approve of, but it still isn't going to help: all the assets get sold, and all the investor groups (a) know that (b) can get the stuff cheap because it's a fire-sale, and (c) know the exact size and shape of the market opportunity created by the dissolution. And there's a workforce right there, who were all laid off and are looking for work, who have exactly the skills you need and are already conveniently located and familiar with the equipment.
The debt doesn't get fully paid off, there's just nobody to do the paying.
They literally said "it isn't even all the profit they made".
That seems pretty clear.
Surely they should be getting fined more than how much they profited?
Preferably (at a minimum) several times the amount, so they (and others) aren't keen to do it again.