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Comment by bikelang | Hacker News Reader

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

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