Hacker News Reader

Comment by idle_zealot | Hacker News Reader

> Companies can't really be expected to police themselves.

Not so long as we don't punish them for failure to. We need a corporate death penalty for an organization that, say, knowingly conspires to destroy the planet's habitability. Then the bean counters might calculate the risk of doing so as unacceptable. We're so ready and willing to punish individuals for harm they do to other individuals, but if you get together in a group then suddenly you can plot the downfall of civilization and get a light fine and carry on.

View on HN

Corporate death penalty as in terminate the corporation?

Why not the actual death penalty? Or put another way, why not sanctions on the individuals these entities are made up of? It strikes me that qualified immunity for police/government officials and the protections of hiding behind incorporation serve the same purpose - little to no individual accountability when these entities do wrong. Piercing the corporate veil and pursuing a loss of qualified immunity are both difficult - in some cases, often impossible - to accomplish in court, thus incentivizing bad behavior for individuals with those protections.

Maybe a reform of those ideas or protocols would be useful and address the tension you highlight between how we treat "individuals" vs individuals acting in the name of particular entities.

As an aside, both protections have interesting nuances and commonalities. I believe they also highlight another tension (on the flip-side of punishment) between the ability of regular people to hold individuals at these entities accountable in civil suits vs the government maintaining a monopoly on going after individuals. This monopoly can easily lead to corruption (obvious in the qualified immunity case, less obvious but still blatant in the corporate case, where these entities and their officers give politicians and prosecutors millions and millions of dollars).

As George Carlin said, it's a big club. And you ain't in it.

In my conception, part of the corporate death penalty would be personal asset forfeitures and prison time for individuals who knew or should have known about the malfeasance.

In these cases, what is prison time going to accomplish that a severe enough monetary remedy would not? Putting someone in a prison cell is a state power (criminal remedy). I think that is a useful distinction generally, and a power that should be employed only when legitimized through some government process which has a very high bar (beyond a reasonable doubt, criminal rules of evidence, protections against self incrimination etc), as it deprives someone of their physical liberty.

It strikes me that if you also appreciate this distinction, then your remedy to corporations that have too much power is to give the government even more power?

Personally, I would like to see more creative solutions that weaken both government and corporations and empower individuals to hold either accountable. I think the current gap between individuals and the other two is too severe, I'm not sure how making the government even more powerful actually helps the individual. Do you want the current American government to be more powerful? Would your answer have been different last year?

I do not see any equivalence between corporate power and government power. The population as a whole controls government power. Corporate power is constrained only by government power. I think one of the most pernicious notions in our society is that the idea that "the government" is something separate from ordinary people.

Of course, our current government has a lot of problems, but that doesn't mean I don't want the government to have power. I just want it to have power to do what the population actually wants it to do (or, perhaps, what the population will actually be happiest with).

What would be your proposed mechanism for empowering individuals? How would such a mechanism not ultimately rely on the individual leveraging some larger external power structure (like a government)? I think if we want to empower all individuals roughly equally (i.e., not in proportion to their wealth or the like), then what we wind up with is something I'd call a government. Definitely not the one we have, but government nonetheless.

It's a fair rejoinder, except I think it mixes idealism about government for realism. In reality, the government becomes an entity unto itself. This is a universal problem of government. Democratic institutions are themselves supposed to be a check on this impulse. However, as you are aware these are not absolute. A check that foresees a need to restrain government also sees a need to empower the government to restrain people.

I think however when we acknowledge that men are not angels, and that therefore government itself is dangerous merely as a centralization of power, then no, you cannot simply say well government is supposed to be of a different type of power than corporations. Because again, in reality this is often not the case. This is why several of the American founders and many of those who fought in that revolution also became anti federalists or argued against constitutional ratification.

I don't know what the answer is, but I don't think there has ever been a situation where it is accurate to say the population as a whole controls the government. In practice it doesn't work that way, and is about as useful as saying well the market controls corporations. I think something more like anti federalism could use a renaissance... the government should be weak in more cases. Individuals should be empowered. A government power to hold a corporation accountable could then rest on simply its strict duty to enforce a civil remedy. That is of a different nature than the government deciding on its own who (and more importantly - who not) to prosecute.

But I appreciate your push back, there are indeed no easy answers.

I still don't really get what you're envisioning. If a government just has a "strict duty to enforce a civil remedy", how does that "empower individuals"? In particular, does it empower all individuals, or just the ones with the time and money to bring a civil suit?

Bullshit. I have no control whatsoever over the government. It is completely separate from me. I have 1000x more power over Amazon by my ability to choose to not buy from them than my vote gives me over government bureaucracy. That's why whenever I have a problem with an Amazon order it is resolved in minutes when I contact support. Good luck if you have a problem with the government.

Amazon are not resolving your issue in minutes because you have power over them. They do it because it is efficient and profitible for them to keep customers happy. Your actual influence over a trillion dollar company is tiny compaired to your influence as a voter. One customer taking there business elsewhere does not affect Amazon in any meaningful way. One vote is counted directly. The gap is between how it feels and how the power actually works. This of course assumes you live in a democratic country.

Your firat two sentences are a total contradiction

Only because you confabulate your personal power with what they really care about.

AMZN shareholders shiver by the sheer control you have over them. Will he return that usb dongle?

Hah. Try the same with Google now. Getting a problem resolved with them as a consumer is a cakewalk compared to the government.

You are a user of Google, but you probably aren't a customer.

How can a user become a customer in a sense that helps them with this? Not a business, an individual user. In any case, you're playing semantics - Google has effectively become unavoidable in daily life yet solving issues with them is at least as hard as with the government.

> prison time for individuals

Corporal punishment exists for individuals too.

Perhaps it should be on the table for executives (etc) whose companies knowingly caused the deaths or other horrific outcomes for many, many people?

This is what China does. The problem is that the application is a little, uh, selective. As soon as you get any kind of corruption it becomes a power play between different factions in the elites.

You can't do any of this without a strong, independent, judiciary, strongly resistant to corruption. Making that happen is harder than it sounds.

And it still won't help, because the perps are sociopaths and they can't process consequences. So it's not a deterrent.

The only effective way to deal with this is to bar certain personality types from positions of power.

You might think that sounds outrageous, but we effectively have that today, only in reverse. People with strong moral codes are actively excluded from senior management.

It's a covert farming process that excludes those who would use corporate power constructively rather than abusing it for short-term gain.

Just nationalize the company. Make shareholders fear this so much that they keep executives in check.

My view is that the corporate death penalty is either dissolution or nationalization, whichever is less disruptive. If you make your company "too big to fail" without hurting loads of people, then use it to hurt people, then the people get your company. If it's a smaller operation it can just go poof. The priority should be ensuring the bad behavior is stopped, then that harm is rectified, and finally that an example be made to anyone else with a clever new way to externalize harm as a business model.

Sounds like a very extreme remedy. Not sure you want whatever government is elected every four years to have this power. Doesn't address the concern re regulatory capture, could lead to worse government incentives. Why not focus on allowing regular people to more realistically hold corporations and their owners/officers liable in civil courts? It's already hard enough given the imbalance of funds, access and power... but often legal doctrine makes the bar to clear impossible at the outset.

I would posit that we are in the current political situation precisely because we do not hold the capital class accountable. Do you sincerely believe that investors losing their investment is a “very extreme” response to gross corporate lawbreaking on their behalf?

We are in this situation because we elect people who do not hold the capital class accountable. Look at the people we elect. How would them running companies be any better?

The capital class chooses and presents the people you can vote for. They decide what issues are talked about in the media, they decide who gets the most funding, and they probably have ways of getting rid of or corrupt the people who somehow get popular without first being accepted by at least some people from the capital class.

We are in the situation because the capital class have turned the people we elect into servile puppets. Because they have simply been allowed to become too big and powerful.

I disagree with you there. We need to stop infantilising politicians.

They aren't servile puppets because they are children, they are servile puppets because that's what they are paid (and threatened, via financing their more pliable opponents) to do.

Why not make the civil case path easier then? The extreme nature of your remedy is the idea of a government taking over and owning a corporation. That creates bad incentives. I think if individuals could reasonably expect to be able to knock people like Mark Zuckerberg out of the billionaire class in a civil suit, then yes, he and the types of people he represents would behave better. Having the government run Facebook or Enron or Google or whatever both sounds less desirable than empowering individuals and weakening corporate protections in civil cases, and frankly; worse than the prevailing situation re the "capital class". If you think the current political situation is bad the last thing you should want is more government power.

So punish the owners of the company because it's harmful, but keep the harmful company around just now controlled by the government?

Sometimes harm is a matter of degree and intent

Doctors selling you fentanyl so you can be sedated for surgery is a good thing.

Drug Dealers selling you fentanyl so you can get high is a bad thing

Except drug dealers do not sell you fentanyl just so you can get high because they do not care. They do not care about YOUR OWN intention. People demand, they supply. And these people can have legitimate reasons.

You ever been approached by anyone selling drugs?

Of course they care about you getting high, that's their sales pitch

I have not, but perhaps it applies to low-level drug dealers, sure, but big-time suppliers really do not care what your intent is. Many of them sell legitimate pharmaceuticals and they do not ask you what your intent is before they sell it to you, as it is none of their concern.

It is very difficult to sell anything to anyone if you don't care what they want

Even if it is as simple as "do you want to get high?" drug dealers absolutely do care what your intent is before selling to you

And they certainly care if your intent is to get them arrested and put them in jail

What would they fear about it? Nationalisation would include compensation (as per relevant laws), so the shareholders don't lose a lot. Maybe the compensation would be less than the potential highs of the stock price, but it's not like they entirely lose out

The actual death penalty is not a good idea for several reasons, including possibility of error (even if that possibility is small).

(In the case of a corporation, also many people might be involved, some of whom might not know what it is, therefore increasing the possibility of error.)

However, terminating the corporation might help (combined with fines if they had earned any profit from it so far), if there is not an effective and practical lesser punishment which would prevent this harm.

However, your other ideas seem to be valid points; one thing that you mention is, government monopoly can (and does) lead to corruption (although not only this specific kind).

“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.” ― Voltaire

Problem remains: What do we do, if others don't care and violently start killing our group? Do we reward them, throwing away all our weapons and making them our new government?

This question of course currently has a very real real world parallel.