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Sure you can do it, to people with criminal prosecution. Criminal prosecution isn't regulation. If the only deterrent to stealing things were fines, the poor wo

Sure you can do it, to people with criminal prosecution. Criminal prosecution isn't regulation. If the only deterrent to stealing things were fines, the poor would only be stealing things all day. They would have nothing to lose and everything to win . But when you're up against corporations, the only thing they can lose is money. And the incentive structure is such that losing 100% with some probability is still profitable. That's why this happens. No regulation can bring the loss further down. Therefore you can't regulate it away. Regulation is only a possible solution to a problem when it has a high enough probably for a penalty, and high enough penalty (100% is always the maximum!), to tilt back the expectation value from different choices. You can't solve this with regulation. Regulation can't, by definition, solve misaligned behavior which already happens under when the risk is 100% loss on getting discovered.

CPLX 4y ago
Your premise has a hole in it. The maximum is not “100% of the corporate assets” at all. Regulation doesn’t just apply to the corporate entity it applies to the actual humans involved. You can have regulations that require those humans to provide regular documents to the government with severe penalties for falsifying them, you can require licensing and training and all sorts of things. Of course criminal prosecution is a type of regulation. It’s also a standard counterpart to run of the mill corporate regulations that creates incentives for people to follow regulations. People have kids and families and most certainly respond to incentives. You can threaten those humans with loss of everything they own and their own personal feeedom. Try running an airline without any licensing and see if shutting down the airline is the maximum consequence . Good luck with that. Regulations have teeth. The government of course can do more than just wipe out a company.

CPLX 4y ago

Your premise has a hole in it. The maximum is not “100% of the corporate assets” at all. Regulation doesn’t just apply to the corporate entity it applies to the actual humans involved. You can have regulations that require those humans to provide regular documents to the government with severe penalties for falsifying them, you can require licensing and training and all sorts of things. Of course criminal prosecution is a type of regulation. It’s also a standard counterpart to run of the mill corporate regulations that creates incentives for people to follow regulations. People have kids and families and most certainly respond to incentives. You can threaten those humans with loss of everything they own and their own personal feeedom. Try running an airline without any licensing and see if shutting down the airline is the maximum consequence . Good luck with that. Regulations have teeth. The government of course can do more than just wipe out a company.