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Comment by StarterPro | Hacker News Reader

That's, what? Half an hour of operation to them?

In Finland, speeding fines are based on your income. Can we have that, but for corporations?

Second this.

Countries should take stock equity over fines. It dilutes the owners share value and punishes stockholders who don't make a company's' boards accountable. With ownership, the government also then has the ability to 'peer behind the veil' more easily and make sure management is behaving. Finally, if a company continues to misbehave the government over time takes ownership and can then replace the board (think a corporate equiv to a death penalty, since under the law corporations are treated as people).

Is this a novel concept?

Sounds like expropriation by another name, honestly.

> With ownership, the government also then has the ability to 'peer behind the veil' more easily and make sure management is behaving

You want every politician you don’t like in the country having this power?

> if a company continues to misbehave the government over time takes ownership and can then replace the board

This is expropriation. (It’s also fines with extra steps and ongoing costs.)

> think a corporate equiv to a death penalty

Corporate death penalties are fines with extra steps. They’re a red herring to avoid what companies actually fear, massive fines that force them into liquidation. Anything you want with a corporate death penalty, massive fines achieve more cleanly. The only function bringing the former up has is to distract from the latter.

If it reduces corporate power enough we might actually be able to get some trustworthy people into office.

> reduces corporate power enough we might actually be able to get some trustworthy people into office

If what did? The history of expropriation is one way: the rulers and their families accumulate the jewels. OpenAI gets fined and given to Biden, Meta gets fined and given to Trump. The economy gets divided by the people who have the power to seize.

Can you articulate an equilibrium of political economy that reflects your redesign? Like what’s the role of politics in economics?

Reducing the power of any potential rivals is supposed to make a position more attractive to the trustworthy? That sounds rather backwards.

> You want every politician you don’t like in the country having this power?

What an interesting question. I personally feel like this line of thinking is a microcosm of how terrible the US frame of mind is right now.

Mostly though, you like some of them??

It’s the only question worth asking, ever, about law: when the law is inevitably misused, how bad is the outcome?

> you like some of them?

Yes, the ones who understand why betting on benevolent dictators is a losing strategy in the long run.

Is that really true? CDP stops the operation. Massive fines would allow the company to continue operating sold off. The fines may be financially worse for the owner but in terms of the unlawful and antisocial behavior the death penalty would more directly end the conduct by ending their operation.

In many cases this would be preferable I think: the owners may well have been unaware of the bad conduct and at least individually unable to prevent it. In that case, ending operations and unwinding the company and returning whatever wealth can be recovered to the owners may be a more fair thing to do.

> CDP stops the operation

What do you do with the assets? If you’re reorganizing them, this is no different from putting e.g. the automakers through bankruptcy. If you’re taking them over, it’s no different from a bail-out. If you’re liquidating them, why are you liquidating them? Just fine them and let them sort out the selling of assets.

> ending operations and unwinding the company and returning whatever wealth can be recovered to the owners

They’d just reconstitute the company. Presumably they weren’t seeking liquidation beforehand, and see the combined assets worth more than them individually.

Corporate death penalty is a distracting term from massive fines (and license revocations). Fines are a possibility. Corporate death penalties are needlessly, some might say intentionally, over complicated in a way that makes them far favourable to massive fines or revocations.

This is pretty naive about the reality of stock ownership. If you're an investor in the US, you probably own the S&P 500. You want me to hold 500 different companies accountable? And, failing that, you're going to dilute my shares?

The reality is that shares are absolutely useless as a distribution of responsibility. Shareholder decisions are dominated by a few majority shareholders who likely hold shares as part of a portfolio, and in the context of a portfolio, it's the whole thing that matters, so it may even be good to tank the share price of one company if it benefits the value of other holdings. Minority shareholders are held responsible for majority decisions they may have directly opposed. And shareholders are limited in what they can do to hold people responsible anyway: if approve a bonus check to the CEO for a successful quarter and then find out that the success was built on murdering toddlers, the CEO still has the bonus check and there's nothing the shareholders can do to retract it.

I think a better solution is to admit the basic fact that people, not corporations, make decisions, and when people make unethical decisions, hold those people personally responsible. Stop trying to fiddle the knobs of your economic Rube Goldberg machine to get the invisible hand to hold people responsible, and hold people responsible.

This happens to some extent via punitive damages, which are designed to be large enough to get the attention of the offender. I don't think it happens outside of punitive damages though.

I like the idea. If you're a startup that's losing money, you can get paid by the government to commit crime?

Maybe proportional to revenue (not profit).

Plus standard baseline?

Revenue, while it would solve the fact that profit-taking vs reinvestment is arbitrary there are other flaws. For one that would make it disproportionately ruinous on low margin businesses. If the fix was so simple I suspect that we would see it tried in more places.

I don't think it's just simplicity. It's probably also contrary to the interests of some of the law-makers' biggest donors.

It's really frustrating to see this disingenuous comment repeated whenever this conversation comes up.

Yes. See GDPR (max fine 4% of global annual revenue) or the new EU Digital Services Act (max fine 6% of global annual revenue).

These are both fairly new laws, if you look at the laws they replace (which themselves may not even be that old), the fines are a huge leap up.

You can't. In a Capitalistic world, companies, large companies control the world. You are asking for the hand to cut itself. It might work for a few countries but is unthinkable for any medium-large countries when companies are allowed to grow to a certain extent.

I was told that in Monaco, if you are caught speeding in a supercar, your fine is much more than if you are caught speeding on your moped. I thought that seemed fair to me. Whether it is true or not is something I never looked up as I will never be in the situation of needing to know. If it's not true, then seems like a waste of a good idea that people seem to want to be true.

Speeding fines are often based on how much over the limit you are going, which is perfectly sensible given that reflects the danger and discourages petty over-enforcement of very low margin speeding.

Adding mass of the vehicle as a component to fines would also be a sensible measure to make the fine reflect the hazard.

while all of that might be true, I'm pretty sure none of that had anything to do with the supercar policy.

The corporations finance.the politicians, so no. It's all for show, and lines the pockets of the lawyers, who are the primary political class.

It's 5 minutes of revenue. They made it back 12X since an hour ago when the article hit HN.

For comparison, for a person making $100K per year, the fine was less than a dollar.

> 5 minutes of revenue. They made it back

'revenue' is not a complement to 'made it back', you have to look at profit for that.

That would even be okay if there were an understanding the fines would continue until the problematic behaviour stops, but it’s unclear from the article whether that’s actually the case.

> The fines against Amazon are small compared with the company’s size — it brought in $574 billion in revenue last year — but significant for a state labor agency. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the federal agency charged with preventing workplace safety issues, frequently investigates Amazon workplaces and has issued dozens of citations, but is severely limited in the size of fines it can bring.

I mean, so? And what is it limited by, given a limit on fines is essentially a limit on the size of the company that can be regulated?

A small rounding error.

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