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The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act should be repealed and American companies should be allowed to compete on equal footing with their foreign competitors. No oth
by legalcorrection 5y ago
The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act should be repealed and American companies should be allowed to compete on equal footing with their foreign competitors. No other country, even if it technically has an FCPA-like law on the books, actually enforces it to the extent the US does. It means that everyone is free to openly participate in bribery to win foreign markets, markets where bribery is just how business is done, while American companies have their hands tied behind their backs. This has overall been a major hamper on American competitiveness while being a huge boon to middle-men and white collar criminal defense lawyers who specialize in working around the laws and defending against prosecutions.
- spaetzleesser 5y agoI am against that. The result could be that US companies would go all in on bribing and make the countries even more corrupt. It would make the US even more hypocritical when they preach ethics to the world.
- InitialLastName 5y agoPerhaps (and I recognize that this is controversial) the US should reconsider its habit of preaching ethics to the world.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mring33621 5y agoI don't like it but I think this is a realistic opinion. Maybe overseas bribes become legal, but must be disclosed in a publicly-accessible format.
- otterley 5y agoDo you think our laws should be tuned for maximum profit, or to reflect who we are, ethically and morally, as a society?
- fallingknife 5y agoFrom a moral standpoint I think we have to accept how other societies are run and act accordingly, and our laws should end at our borders.
- otterley 5y agoThat suggests that human beings are substantially different outside our borders, and that ethics are not universal.
- missedthecue 5y agoI would say that's more or less observably true
- otterley 5y agoGo on...
- missedthecue 5y agoI don't think every culture has exactly the same ethical framework. One can easily imagine a few different examples where that's not the case.
- pessimizer 5y agoI think the question is more about whether you have the same ethical framework when dealing with other cultures as when dealing with your own, not whether other cultures tend toward different ethical standards themselves.
- legalcorrection 5y agoYour consistent ethical framework can be to respect the laws (the de facto laws) of the places you operate in. For a whole country, part of any reasonable ethical code is something like not interfering in the internal affairs of other countries, which means not exercising legal jurisdiction over actions that take place in other countries and don't really concern you.
- fallingknife 5y agoYes. It's not our governments job to prosecute foreign bribery. It's the foreign government's job. And if they don't do their job, I don't see how that's my problem.
- Quarrelsome 5y agothat stank flows upstream which is why we want it stamped out.
- cjbgkagh 5y agoIn my view that law is to protect very big US companies that pay the middle men from the smaller US companies that don’t.
- Zigurd 5y agoTo do so would be to invite a large increase in corruption in businesses within the US.
- Rury 5y agoNo, this reeks of putting money over ethics, and would likely increase corruption in the US. IMO, we shouldn't do business with countries via practices we view as corrupt, even if we were following their laws and would mean losing their business.