Comment by GuB-42 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by GuB-42 | Hacker News Reader

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And I think there is a good reason for that. When a company steals billions from customers, the entire company is responsible, and the entire company profits from the crime. So why single out a few executives? Everyone shall be punished: the CEO of course, but also every employee, every shareholder. You have a single VW stock, you are responsible too.

So, how do you punish everyone fairly? By fining the company for a large amount of money. Shareholders lose their value, employees don't get their raise, and execs won't get their bonus, there is a good chance they get fired too. Companies are for profit, it is even more true for public companies, for which profit is their duty to their shareholders. So hit where it hurts, that is profits.

As for jailing CEOs, what will it bring? Don't forget that a CEO is just an employee, hired by the directors to maximize profits for the shareholders. If the entire company is corrupt, everyone will be more than happy to hire scapegoat CEOs if it can serve their interests. Jailing them will solve nothing, it may even be counter productive as those who are most likely to get that job are people who are ready to risk prison to win big, a crime lord profile.

There are still reasons to jail the CEO, but only if he personally deceived the rest of the company and shareholders, but that is effectively the same as stealing from the company.

My issue with your comment is that you're taking the humanity out of it. A person or group of people decided to commit crimes. Go to jail. If a group of people hired a scapegoat, that group still would've conspired to commit crimes. That's a punishable offense. Punish them. You can punish a board of directors. You can persecute a C-suite. They're all humans. That's the way justice is. Nobody is above the law.

Corporate death penalty. I want to see these groups of "shareholder value" get destroyed. Equal to a damage of a normal death penalty to an individual. Spread the organization to the winds.

If that means a "company" becomes smaller, with more isolated crews run by their own leadership, good.

I could see there being an issue with too much forced collusion if companies are too small to operate. Like how a lot of companies put all the blame on a profitless, employee-less "subsidiary" and say "oh no, we can't pay a fine, we have no money. We gave all our profits to Company Inc Ltd, we're just Company Inc." We'd need to fix that first. Then corporate death penalty. Which I believe does exist but isn't used very often. I think some court rulings have forbidden operations in certain states.

No. Decision making authority is concentrated in executives and managers, and likewise so should the lgal responsibility be. Spreading it evenly across the whole entity such that the janitor is punished in the same proportion as the individuals who decide to commit fraud is nonsensical. shareholders should certainly take a hit, but consequences should be administered in proportion to the degree of authority exercised in the commission of the crime.

> So, how do you punish everyone fairly?

By punishing those who decided to commit the crime? Indirectly benefiting from somebody's else illegal actions is not a crime (you might be required to pay it back but that's it..).

Generally executives are the ones who benefit the most of these case and then leave the rest of of the company and the shareholders on the hook while they move on or retire.

> and execs won't get their bonus,

What if they already have their bonuses? Generally it might take years for any investigation to conclude, often executives who benefited from it couldn't care less what happens to the company they don't work at anymore anyway.

I don't understand how jailing CEOs doesn't place pressure on CEOs to steer a company to follow the law thereby leading to better long-term outcomes for society as a whole. It also creates an incentive structure where the corrupt systems that currently exist are harder to entrench because there is no bystander effect where everyone can just "blame the system" and go along with things without culpability.

My evidence for my view is basically pointing at all countries with strong rule of law and institutions having less corrupt systems. In so many countries bribery is just considered "the way things are done". Add robust systems for punishments to those with the most authority instead of blaming some abstract entity and watch as all of a sudden the whole system creaks towards accountability. Hasn't this happened reliably in basically every country that enacted and reliably enforced democratic laws?

We should also include neighbours of the CEO and the employees as they have also just watched as their neighbours committed these crimes. As well as the bus driver who enabled them to commit these crimes in the first place by driving the to the crime scene!

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