9 ms·

When I first heard that states were looking to confiscate $5B from the Sackler family, I was pleasantly surprised, only to find out that they’re worth more than

When I first heard that states were looking to confiscate $5B from the Sackler family, I was pleasantly surprised, only to find out that they’re worth more than $13B. As long as the financial punishment don’t outpace this kind of behavior among the wealthy, it’s really just a tax on them.

state_less 7y ago
A financial punishment is all? Pushing that much narcotics on people normally lands you in jail.
- cmurf 7y ago
  Prison is for serfs and peasants. Lords pay fines to the sovereign. Why be wealthy if you can't buy justice as a product?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - 8ytecoder 7y ago
    Hammurabi’s code [1]. “For example, if a doctor killed a rich patient, he would have his hands cut off, but if he killed a slave, only financial restitution was required“ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Hammurabi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Hammurabi
    - munk-a 7y ago
      It is a bit depressing that things are so similar today - it highlights some of the larger hidden failures of egalitarianism even while it is being celebrated.
  - jacobush 7y ago
    Incredible this is downvoted.
    - colejohnson66 7y ago
      Because it doesn’t add anything to the discussion
      - tasubotadas 7y ago
        Also, I would say that in general 2edgy4me conspiracy slogans make people puke. I think it would take on online generator/database of such slogans to see how pointless and ridiculous they are.
Iv 7y ago
While I totally agree that the Sacklers should be considered like a criminal organization conspiring to kill people and would deserve long jail time, there is another goal to this confiscation than punishment. It is a way to change incentives. I don't know what part of their $13B wealth comes from opioids, but this tax made it suddenly far, far less profitable. They will make their calculation of what would have been a better course of action, but if they had found a way to stay within the law and only lost $3B in revenues, it would have been profitable. Fines are an efficient way to regulate companies and always welcomed, even if insufficient. Not only this is like a tax, but there is a randomness factor it: it depends on a court decision. A lot of companies are risk-adverse so such a fine can have a chilling multiplier.
- geofft 7y ago
  I think the argument of the comment you're replying to is that it was profitable and they did make the calculation. They're left with $7B, which is a lot. It's hard to make $7B. And the multiplier works in the other way. Because of the non-deterministic chance of whether you get caught and whether you get punished and whether all of this happens before you donate all your money to charitable causes and die, the expected value of your loss is a fraction of the fine. A truly effective penalty would fine them many times the illegal profit to account for that.
  - loeg 7y ago
    They also did not end up giving up any of their personal wealth in the settlement. $5B was just the starting bid. > A truly effective penalty would fine them many times the illegal profit to account for that. How much of the profit was illegal and how would you go about quantifying that?
    - geofft 7y ago
      > How much of the profit was illegal and how would you go about quantifying that? I mean, I haven't done a criminal investigation of the Sacklers, so I'm the wrong person to ask. But on general principle - if the goal is to use fines to disincentivize future criminal behavior (which seems reasonable to me, but it's not the only factor at play in setting fines), you should treat all profit that was related to the criminal behavior as criminal and not try to reverse-engineer "How much money would they have made if they hadn't done this crime." Otherwise you're still incentivized to try 10 different legally-questionable strategies and keep the profit from the 9 that were found to be on the other side of the line. As a concrete example, if Google's copying of Java interfaces were ruled illegal (and to be clear I don't think it should be), then an appropriate fine is (some multiple of) all profit from Android, not some attempt at retconning how much money Google would have made if they had used something other than Java or waited for OpenJDK. (That's a fine, to be clear, not damages. Oracle's damages should be calculated by retconning how much they would have gained had Google kept the laws, and nothing more.)

state_less 7y ago

A financial punishment is all? Pushing that much narcotics on people normally lands you in jail.

cmurf 7y ago
Prison is for serfs and peasants. Lords pay fines to the sovereign. Why be wealthy if you can't buy justice as a product?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- 8ytecoder 7y ago
  Hammurabi’s code [1]. “For example, if a doctor killed a rich patient, he would have his hands cut off, but if he killed a slave, only financial restitution was required“ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Hammurabi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Hammurabi
  - munk-a 7y ago
    It is a bit depressing that things are so similar today - it highlights some of the larger hidden failures of egalitarianism even while it is being celebrated.
- jacobush 7y ago
  Incredible this is downvoted.
  - colejohnson66 7y ago
    Because it doesn’t add anything to the discussion
    - tasubotadas 7y ago
      Also, I would say that in general 2edgy4me conspiracy slogans make people puke. I think it would take on online generator/database of such slogans to see how pointless and ridiculous they are.

Iv 7y ago

While I totally agree that the Sacklers should be considered like a criminal organization conspiring to kill people and would deserve long jail time, there is another goal to this confiscation than punishment. It is a way to change incentives. I don't know what part of their $13B wealth comes from opioids, but this tax made it suddenly far, far less profitable. They will make their calculation of what would have been a better course of action, but if they had found a way to stay within the law and only lost $3B in revenues, it would have been profitable. Fines are an efficient way to regulate companies and always welcomed, even if insufficient. Not only this is like a tax, but there is a randomness factor it: it depends on a court decision. A lot of companies are risk-adverse so such a fine can have a chilling multiplier.

geofft 7y ago
I think the argument of the comment you're replying to is that it was profitable and they did make the calculation. They're left with $7B, which is a lot. It's hard to make $7B. And the multiplier works in the other way. Because of the non-deterministic chance of whether you get caught and whether you get punished and whether all of this happens before you donate all your money to charitable causes and die, the expected value of your loss is a fraction of the fine. A truly effective penalty would fine them many times the illegal profit to account for that.
- loeg 7y ago
  They also did not end up giving up any of their personal wealth in the settlement. $5B was just the starting bid. > A truly effective penalty would fine them many times the illegal profit to account for that. How much of the profit was illegal and how would you go about quantifying that?
  - geofft 7y ago
    > How much of the profit was illegal and how would you go about quantifying that? I mean, I haven't done a criminal investigation of the Sacklers, so I'm the wrong person to ask. But on general principle - if the goal is to use fines to disincentivize future criminal behavior (which seems reasonable to me, but it's not the only factor at play in setting fines), you should treat all profit that was related to the criminal behavior as criminal and not try to reverse-engineer "How much money would they have made if they hadn't done this crime." Otherwise you're still incentivized to try 10 different legally-questionable strategies and keep the profit from the 9 that were found to be on the other side of the line. As a concrete example, if Google's copying of Java interfaces were ruled illegal (and to be clear I don't think it should be), then an appropriate fine is (some multiple of) all profit from Android, not some attempt at retconning how much money Google would have made if they had used something other than Java or waited for OpenJDK. (That's a fine, to be clear, not damages. Oracle's damages should be calculated by retconning how much they would have gained had Google kept the laws, and nothing more.)