If the evaluation is flawed... do you see why it's not a good idea?
Examples from the healthcare, banking, pharmaceutical (notably Purdue) or petrochemical industries might be particularly appropriate.
My read of the street is that the institution of law and courts has been assessed as insufficient and/or terminally dysfunctional.
What's the view you're defending? That CEOs should be murdered when some arbitrary citizen ready to do murder thinks the CEO is guilty enough?
I totally think law and order is dysfunctional. I don't know if people will actually resort to murder, but I could understand why they would do it. (It's far easier to talk about it than to do it.)
But it is not a good solution to the problem. The system of "murder people when we are upset" will certainly be at least as dysfunctional as the current one, if not more. Law being taken into the hands of whoever has weapons and the will to do it is what happens in narco states. Who prefers that?
One would think that this is a target-rich environment, and yet there don't seem to be many cases of that occurring. You've not answered my own question (choosing to rather spectacularly misinterpret and misstate my comment instead). I've put the question (phrased several ways) to an LLM which first responded with a set of decades-old fraud (e.g., creditor/shareholder victims) cases, and then point blank refused to suggest who might be prosecuted, or even who has been discussed as being plausibly prosecuted (interesting set of guardrails).
The law for whatever reasons --- I can think of several and there are many which have been expressed both recently and going back through time, Anatole France's observation of the law and its majestic equality would be among the classic and better known --- seems not to take an interest into affronts against the public at large.
I think my point was clearly expressed as originally put, if you've any difficulties in interpreting this, please say how and where: My read of the street is that the institution of law and courts has been assessed as insufficient and/or terminally dysfunctional.
The alternatives are not good, a point on which I suspect we're agreed. But they'll be reached for where institutions consistently fail, if I read history correctly.
And to draw on another recent HN thread, if the purpose of a system is what it does, then the system isn't broken but is performing as intended. Which would itself be a problem.
(See: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42313947> among numerous others: <https://hn.algolia.com/?q=stafford%20beer>.)
Perhaps the exception that proves the rule.
> If you can fairly and correctly evaluate which CEOs are especially blood sucking, simply taking their money and sending them to prison for a while will have the same effect and be far less ethically dubious.
But that would require the buy in and cooperation of the state, which probably wouldn't work any better than the current political/judicial system, because elites like CEOs have disproportionate influence in controlling state behavior. The system is setup to primarily protect and serve people like them.
I think the GP's idea was to add an extra-judicial check on CEO behavior that could be implemented by a motivated individual, and thus would be much harder for CEOs to subvert. Even the threat of assassination could have a restraining effect, because who wants to live in a bunker surrounded by guards? The blood-sucking CEO wouldn't be able to enjoy his ill-gotten gains.
One (somewhat small) problem with the GP's idea is its focus on CEOs. One feature of capitalism is how it can obscure culpability and create scapegoats to misdirect anger and protect the principles. A CEO definitely has fault and responsibility for the company's actions, but he's ultimately a minion of the company's owners. Above the CEO things often get shadowy.
Courts and laws have become corrupted, but you tink letting people at random make their own justice will not be corrupted?
One of the reasons this even sounds remotely possible to you is we have not abandoned the idea of the rule of law. If it were abandoned outright, the CEOs (or whatever) would never be outside of protected areas and without guards and such. Ordinary citizens however, would not afford protection.
I know nothing, but reading the news "CEO assasinated" my first thought is he was murdered by a rival organisation.
CEOs are not martians. They're some of "the people" we are talking about. They rose to the top through ruthlessness and disregard for laws and such. You think giving up on laws will make them less powerful?
And the "let whoever is upset try to murder the respective CEO" analysis has no problems? I think it has more.
If we’re in a world with such lobbying... do you see why prosecution might fail despite its merits?
Stated another way, society's end of the social contract is to make sure that people generally aren't upset enough to commit murder.
> Imagine a world where the especially blood-sucking CEOs have a 1/10 chance of being assassinated.
Assassination isn’t prosecution.
My point is, it’s the fantastical world that actually prosecutes corporate managers for their criminal decisions. Shit, it’s the fantastical world that has American laws which make it illegal for UHC to have the business practice of denying claims by default unless/until they’re positively proven necessary beyond any sliver of doubt.
I am not trying to say murder will work to correct corporate behavior, I’m saying that it’s the thing we can see actually happens as an attempt to correct the behavior. It’s not hard to find many examples in this thread of people who think corps get away with too much. That is how one can tell there is a lack of prosecution and/or protection laws.
The real world has unfortunate circumstances that encourage this kind of crime because America does not have effective laws/enforcement which curtail the power of the corporations who write said laws. That’s the fantasy. We don’t live in a world where execs can be prosecuted for most of their anti-social decisions, let alone are.
I never made a value call about what’s fair, I only pointed out that the idea of prosecution in this context is a fantasy.
I.e. yes, we absolutely should prosecute more white collar crime.