Executives serving actual jail time. Prohibited from joining the boards of public/private companies. Personal liability.
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.
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.