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White collar crime. It pays! Shouldn’t the CEO go to jail? That might make them behave themselves, and possibly go some way towards justifying their astronomic

by adwhit 9y ago

White collar crime. It pays! Shouldn’t the CEO go to jail? That might make them behave themselves, and possibly go some way towards justifying their astronomical salaries.

optimuspaul 9y ago
Why just the CEO? How about the CFO, the Board of Directors, and Chief Legal Consul? Maybe you could say the CEO is the last line and should be held accountable. It seems to me that you can't really do that since so many people could have been involved or even shielding the CEO from knowledge of the illegal activity. It's probably too onerous to investigate the individuals responsible. I don't think you are wrong, there should be individuals held accountable.
- FridgeSeal 9y ago
  I agree: start at the top and burn down through the executives and the board until the people that are left (and the ones that fill the gaps) don't want to risk doing shady/anti-competitive/etc stuff. We will nothing, and we will fix nothing by slapping these companies on the wrist and then letting them go back to what they're doing.
xoa 9y ago
>Shouldn’t the CEO go to jail? No. While it's always tempting to bring out the torches and pitchforks and go straight for the emotional response, please try to keep in mind that specifics in law matters because it affects the rights of the regular person far more. Criminal and Civil violations of the law are not the same thing for very good reason, and that's not a matter of white collar vs blue collar or any other color of collar. We want to discourage civil violations, but in general those are things where the situation can be made whole purely through money. There are no victims of non-reversible physical harm. Qualcomm's violation is not the same thing as dumping carcinogens into a water supply or VW's pollution or worker safety violations or cutting corners on life-safety product requirements or whatever. It's not even clearly market damaging to the level of situation's like Intel's actions vis-a-vis AMD. It's a violation and one they should have caught, but at least mildly fuzzier, and the violation is already over not ongoing. A sizable fine, investigations into more, and the threat of larger ones in the future seems a genuinely reasonable response to a situation like this absent continued patterns of bad behavior. Seriously, we have way too much criminalization of things that should be civil violations already. There are certainly many times that people in power get away with things that should be criminal and we should be trying to bring them into line with what applies to everyone, but there are also a lot of times where people in power get away with things that shouldn't be criminal for everyone. In that case the common feeling of "bringing them down to our level" is backwards, we should instead be working to bring the standards for everyone else up. Both are equalization of advantage, but that doesn't make them an equivalent end result. Prison is not something we should ever be in the habit of reflexively resorting to.
- rbranson 9y ago
  > Seriously, we have way too much criminalization of things that should be civil violations already. Do you think that perhaps this has to do with the much larger pool of resources put behind criminal prosecution vs civil?
- adwhit 9y ago
  I don't really care if the CEO goes the prison or not. If they personally pay a fine so great that they will be impoverished for the rest of their life, that would be good enough for me. The point it that no-one has actually been punished here. No-one will personally suffer in a way that they would even notice. There is no deterrent. I also disagree that there are no victims. Money and the lack thereof has profound effects on people's lives. People get depressed, get divorced, commit crimes and commit suicide due to the inscrutable flow of capital into and out of their lives. There are victims, somewhere. We just don't know who they are.

by adwhit 9y ago

White collar crime. It pays! Shouldn’t the CEO go to jail? That might make them behave themselves, and possibly go some way towards justifying their astronomical salaries.

optimuspaul 9y ago

Why just the CEO? How about the CFO, the Board of Directors, and Chief Legal Consul? Maybe you could say the CEO is the last line and should be held accountable. It seems to me that you can't really do that since so many people could have been involved or even shielding the CEO from knowledge of the illegal activity. It's probably too onerous to investigate the individuals responsible. I don't think you are wrong, there should be individuals held accountable.

FridgeSeal 9y ago
I agree: start at the top and burn down through the executives and the board until the people that are left (and the ones that fill the gaps) don't want to risk doing shady/anti-competitive/etc stuff. We will nothing, and we will fix nothing by slapping these companies on the wrist and then letting them go back to what they're doing.

xoa 9y ago

>Shouldn’t the CEO go to jail? No. While it's always tempting to bring out the torches and pitchforks and go straight for the emotional response, please try to keep in mind that specifics in law matters because it affects the rights of the regular person far more. Criminal and Civil violations of the law are not the same thing for very good reason, and that's not a matter of white collar vs blue collar or any other color of collar. We want to discourage civil violations, but in general those are things where the situation can be made whole purely through money. There are no victims of non-reversible physical harm. Qualcomm's violation is not the same thing as dumping carcinogens into a water supply or VW's pollution or worker safety violations or cutting corners on life-safety product requirements or whatever. It's not even clearly market damaging to the level of situation's like Intel's actions vis-a-vis AMD. It's a violation and one they should have caught, but at least mildly fuzzier, and the violation is already over not ongoing. A sizable fine, investigations into more, and the threat of larger ones in the future seems a genuinely reasonable response to a situation like this absent continued patterns of bad behavior. Seriously, we have way too much criminalization of things that should be civil violations already. There are certainly many times that people in power get away with things that should be criminal and we should be trying to bring them into line with what applies to everyone, but there are also a lot of times where people in power get away with things that shouldn't be criminal for everyone. In that case the common feeling of "bringing them down to our level" is backwards, we should instead be working to bring the standards for everyone else up. Both are equalization of advantage, but that doesn't make them an equivalent end result. Prison is not something we should ever be in the habit of reflexively resorting to.

rbranson 9y ago
> Seriously, we have way too much criminalization of things that should be civil violations already. Do you think that perhaps this has to do with the much larger pool of resources put behind criminal prosecution vs civil?
adwhit 9y ago
I don't really care if the CEO goes the prison or not. If they personally pay a fine so great that they will be impoverished for the rest of their life, that would be good enough for me. The point it that no-one has actually been punished here. No-one will personally suffer in a way that they would even notice. There is no deterrent. I also disagree that there are no victims. Money and the lack thereof has profound effects on people's lives. People get depressed, get divorced, commit crimes and commit suicide due to the inscrutable flow of capital into and out of their lives. There are victims, somewhere. We just don't know who they are.