@Colman @volkris @dcjohnson it’s a U.S. law problem, one we could fix, but we won’t any time soon. But I’m not so sure it’s unique to the U.S.; would the Sacklers have faced criminal charges in other countries? There’ve been many times car companies have delayed fixing deadly flaws and thereby killed more people, are those killings prosecuted as crimes in other countries?
@ShadSterling @volkris @dcjohnson sometimes. The tax authorities can be quite good at penetrating the corporate veil when there’s fraud.
The US version is much more extreme than the versions here: legal personhood is not equivalent to personhood.
@Colman @volkris @dcjohnson I’m glad it’s less bad in other places, I hope the U.S. starts caring about its citizens enough to catch up
@ShadSterling You're kind of missing the point there.
The US has designed corporate regulations because these instruments of providing for investment benefit its citizens.
It's BECAUSE the US cares about its citizens that it has more effective corporate rules to promote the general welfare.
And it's pretty noteworthy that internationally over the decades other countries have worked to catch up with the US as they were finding themselves falling behind for their citizens.
@volkris @Colman @dcjohnson the things the US is ahead on are not measures of shared prosperity but of increasing inequality. Investment potential only benefits those rich enough to make investments, which is only about the top 5% of incomes. But this thread isn’t about the financial aspect, it’s about the lack of accountability for harm, including killing people. Having a legal framework for incorporation is good, but it shouldn’t provide that shield.
@ShadSterling a lot of people miss that investments only pay off if they benefit someone else. So when that 5% of incomes put their money toward investment, the only benefit if other people benefit. There's only a payday if someone else thinks what they provide is worth paying for.
But fine, this thread isn't about the financial aspect.
The problem is, there's a legitimate question about who's to blame for a death when there's an organization involved.
If a Chipotle cashier doesn't wash their hands and poisons someone, do you blame the cashier, or the cashiers manager, or the CEO, or the person who invested their 401K into buying stock in the company?
Who actually has to pay for the death? Who is actually responsible?
Corporate law has been developed to provide certainty and a practical framework for answering that question.
It's one thing to say that corporate law shields people from culpability, but when you start thinking about it, it's a lot more complicated than just the superficial take on it.
@volkris @Colman @dcjohnson your example misses the point, which is about business decision-makers who intentionally choose to harm or kill, like the ones in car companies who know about a flaw that will certainly kill drivers of a few percent of a model that has sold tens of thousands of units and choose not to recall them, which is a choice to kill hundreds of people. But we can’t put them on trial for any of those deaths.
@ShadSterling your example is a great one of how people talk about this sort of thing divorced from factual reality.
And it's why these laws are a good thing.
No, a car company producing a car with a known flaw is not intentionally choosing to harm or kill. That is just not the factual reality of even that hypothetical, much less its application in the real world.
The decision to produce a product with a known flaw is a decision to produce the product, not to kill people. The two are not the same. To conflate the two is to put rhetoric above reality.
Of course, that never stops sensational reporting that gets clicks or politicized propaganda that supports powerful interests. Yeah, they do enjoy the benefits of promoting that kind of falsehood.
But, we set up legal processes such that people won't be harmed by that kind of misinformation.
@Colman But I'm saying director s should not be held criminally culpable for things like that. It's a good thing that they're not held criminally culpable. Because it would be holding them accountable for stuff they didn't do, which is fundamentally unjust and practically counterproductive, standing in the way of providing goods and services that we want.
Investment in productive activities is a good thing. We should not be discouraging such investment, and promoting inequality while we're at it, by putting these threats over people and indulging in that sort of sensationalist rhetoric.
Our society is better off that we don't follow that path to illiberalism.
@volkris @Colman @dcjohnson the example wasn’t a decision to produce, but to not warn about and fix something already produced. I’m glad no one you care about has been killed in such a way, or suffered the horrors of oxycontin addiction, or lived in a cancer cluster, and so on, but to deride acknowledgement of such harms as “divorced from factual reality” is a disgusting insult to everyone who has suffered them.
@volkris @Colman @dcjohnson But in your twisted world where businessmen are right to kill the public, how do you protect yourself from being the next victim? What gives you confidence that your water heater won’t detonate due to a flaw the manufacturer has known about for years but refused to address?
@ShadSterling No in the real world these businessmen are not killing the public. That's the whole point.
It's not factually correct to say they are killing the public, and so policy made on the back of such sensationalized stories ends up being weak and often harms the public more than the ills the politicians purport to be addressing.
The first step in addressing any problem is accurately identifying the problem. It is factually inaccurate to talk about these businessmen killing the public when they're not.
@volkris @Colman @dcjohnson It's not like business owners decided to value lives more than money after the Triangle Fire - of course they didn't, they weren't punished for it, and after the insurance payouts they made a profit on it. The only policy I've mentioned is the protection from criminal liability for (non-financial) harm, which explicitly gives permission to do harm; retracting that permission could hardly do more harm than granting it.
@volkris @Colman @dcjohnson The easiest case to find clear information about was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_ignition_switch_recalls , where a deadly fault in about 30 million cars was known to GM for a decade but they did nothing to address it until a lawsuit forced them to, and during that decade the flaw killed a minimum of 124 people. The company had to pay monetary compensation, but none of the people who refused to prevent those deaths faced any criminal prosecution; they were allowed to commit homicide, for a fee.
@volkris @Colman @dcjohnson If they would have been criminally liable for those deaths, they would have recalled and fixed those cars as soon as they knew about the flaw, saving all of those lives, many injuries, and a lot of many peoples time and money spent on unnecessary lawsuits.
But since you're convinced the business decision to let them die isn't a problem, to what other problem would you attribute those deaths, and how would you address that problem?
@ShadSterling or they would have just never made any products for the public at all, or maybe they wouldn't have recalled the products at all.
That's the thing, proposals like these are just not realistic, literally they're not realistic, because they rely on factually false stories, and going down that path often results in unintended consequences that are even worse than the problems they purport to solve.
Again, getting the problem right is the first step. And these stories don't get the problem right.
@volkris @ShadSterling @Colman
Yes, a car company producing a car with a known flaw that kills people IS intentionally choosing to harm or kill. Who are you trying to kid?
You are blocked for intentional disinformation.
@volkris @ShadSterling @dcjohnson you really need to have a look at corporate law outside the US. That would be at least criminal negligence, probably corporate manslaughter and the directors could be held criminally culpable.