I am no more sympathetic than I am towards the many people killed each day in the US, but I think the assassination and the subsequent justification of it because he was a small cog in the system is abhorrent. And I hope that the majority of the country feels the same way.
He had a legally enforceable mandate to maximize shareholder value. There’s some wiggle room in how that’s accomplished, but not as much as it seems from the outside.
That does make him, much as I hate to say it, a small cog.
Hence we have laws - an eternal, never perfect project to find an agreed definition of justice.
Abandoning centuries of precedent of law happens in some places from time to time and they’re not places you’d live by choice.
He chose to take the role. He profited from it massively and did more to perpetuate it than any other single individual at the company.
If we were talking about a developer who was writing software for drone bombs wiping out families, yeah maybe that’s a cog. But still there would be no shortage of judgement on that choice of profession
It’s plainly obvious that insurance companies are not good faith actors working to help people. They lobbied for this system, they are the beneficiaries of it, and they are reaping what they’ve sown
[citation needed]
There is no legal basis for this:
* https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/06/26/the-shareholder-v...
* https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/09/09/how-t...
* https://evonomics.com/maximizing-shareholder-value-dumbest-i...
It is simply one view that just happened to become popular during the Reagan years and has continued on:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine
And while we're at it, shareholders are not the owners of a corporation:
* https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2021/12/who-actually-own...
This tragedy in the same city that could potentially throw the book at a Daniel Penny...
I think it depends where ones sympathies lay.
I can at least grasp killing in some sort of immediate self-defense situation.
However, assassination seems a slippery slope to some anarchy that is unlikely to please anyone this side of Hell.
I'm not sure I agree with you there. The indifference in some quarters, celebration in others, across either side of the political divide insofar as I've seen, leads me to believe that in some cases, the well of sympathy is running dry – or, worse, has run dry.
From what I've seen, 99% of feedback is of "scumbag deserved it" flavor.