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Blackmail as a Victimless Crime: Reply to Altman (1998)
- nicgrev103 3y agoCan two rights make a wrong?
- DaiPlusPlus 3y agoSure: make two right-turns and now you're facing left (which is "sinister" in Latin, coincidence? I think not).
- zeknife 3y agoWouldn't you just be facing backwards?
- alignItems 3y agoWriting nonsense is not a crime. Being a paid academic is not a crime. Writing nonsense as a paid academic should be a crime.
- Closi 3y agoOne of the authors also wrote this book, "The Case For Discrimination" where he argues that companies and individuals should be allowed to discrimate against whoever they like. https://cdn.mises.org/The%20Case%20for%20Discrimination%20Walter%20Block_2.pdf https://cdn.mises.org/The%20Case%20for%20Discrimination%20Wa... A few soundbites from that book which show that this guy is pretty disgusting: > When women enter in the military in any great numbers, it will be a threat to the entire human race. > Today, we consider the silver lining involved in term limits: it reduces the percentage of female politicians. > It is eminently reasonable to bet that some black kid can dunk the basketball and some Oriental kid with thick glasses can solve the quadratic equation. If this be racism, well, so much the worse for me; it is just common sense applied to a sensitive issue. Here is another example Walter Williams offers. Suppose you go into a room and you see a tiger sitting on a couch. What do you do? You have two courses of action. One, you could be prejudiced against tigers and close the door (laughter) and sort of hold the door there and call the cops or the animal control people. Or you can be unprejudiced, don’t pre-judge tigers, don’t profile this tiger on the basis of previous tiger behavior. Here, you go up to the tiger, and say “Hey, what’s happenin’ tiger?” (laughter) “How’s it shakin’?” and you try to give him a high-five. Or, you ask him “Are you vicious?” You are open-minded: just because every other tiger you’ve ever met will bite, you stay open to the possibility that maybe this tiger won’t. If this is racism (or species-ism), make the most of it. This sort of thinking is just behaving on the basis of empirical evidence. Or, to get back to what I was talking about, the same applies to making the claim that blacks have a lower productivity than whites, on average. There are various theories as to why this should be. People on the left say, This is due to racism, or a vestige of slavery. In the view of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, it is based on IQ. But I am not interested in why this is the case. I am only interested in the conclusion: on average, blacks have lower productivity. That’s why they have lower wages, not because of prejudice and discrimination Yeah, I think I will get my ethical views from someone else.
- porsager 3y agoWow. What a dishonest way of pulling things out of context to paint a false picture! > "When women..." - This was in the context of describing how precious women are because they are the ones who bear our future children. Not because they are lesser people in any way. [Chapter 11 - page 32] > "Today, we..." - Again, if you actually read the thing, here's the point from that section: "Second, apart from considerations of this sort, there is no intrinsic reason to favor male over female politicians.". The silver lining point was made in relation to a description of females leaning towards social welfare schemes, which of course is the opposite, of the goal of the author, in his cause for a stateless society. > "It is eminently..." I think it's your own wishes coloring this section, so there's no point in going through it. Try to read it again - where is he saying something you find racist?
- Closi 3y ago> Try to read it again - where is he saying something you find racist? The whole thing in my view, along with other chapters - his argument is essentially that discrimination laws should be removed because the stereotype that ‘blacks are less productive’ is true according to his findings, so people should be allowed to discriminate on a racial basis and as long as we trust the free market and remove regulation everyone will be treated as they should be. And the part where he decides to indirectly compare not-stereotyping black people to not-stereotyping tigers, with the underlying implication of ‘your nature is your nature’. It’s a small extract from a book that continuously demonstrates a worldview that is racist in my view.
- porsager 3y agoThe tiger example is not his, but that of Walter E Williams https://fee.org/articles/racial-profiling/ https://fee.org/articles/racial-profiling/ It's also nonsense that blacks are intrinsically less productive. Nowhere does he say that. Quite the contrary, he is of the belief that blacks would face less discrimination in a stateless society with a free market, which he is certainly in favor of.
- oztamir 3y agoSounds like that Simpsons episode (https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/The_Bob_Next_Door https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/The_Bob_Next_Door): Bob arrives at The Five Corners and has himself and Bart (with his hands and feet bound with duct tape) stand in two of the states at the meeting point. He then tells Bart of his plan to murder him: Bob will stand in one state; reach into a second state and shoot his gun; have the bullet travel through a third state; hit Bart in a fourth state; and Bart will fall dead in the fifth state (although this is not possible, as the bullet would have to curve around to actually hit Bart). Because all portions of the process is legal, he will have immunity from prosecution in all five states so Bob can’t be charged for Bart's murder.
- Gibbon1 3y agoI think there was a man in England insert long ago who killed someone and fled. 40 years later he was found and put on trial. In his defense he argued that he wasn't the same man of 40 years ago. And could point to many many differences to prove his point. The court was quite impressed and had him hung anyways.
- mPReDiToR 3y agoHanged. Just a small nitpick probably unworthy of HN, but it might lead someone to see why I posted, and the difference.
- _a_a_a_ 3y agoI can't see; could you explain pls.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y agoContextually, it hardly matters. However, "hung", as described of a person (usually male), typically refers to the endowment of their genitals and "hanged" will refer to the result of "hanging" as a method of execution.
- 3y ago
- djoldman 3y agoAbstract The legal theory of blackmail is the veritable puzzle surrounded by a mystery wrapped in an enigma. Consider. Blackmail consists of two things, each indisputably legal on their own; yet, when combined in a single act, the result is considered a crime. What are the two things? First, there is either a threat or an offer. In the former case, it is, typically, to publicize an embarrassing secret; in the latter, it is to remain silent about this information. Second, there is a demand or a request for funds or other valuable considerations. When put together, there is a threat that unless paid off, the secret will be told. Either of these things, standing alone, is perfectly legal. To tell an embarrassing secret is to do no more than gossip; no one has ever been incarcerated for that. To ask for money is likewise a legitimate activity, as everyone from Bill Clinton to the beggar to the fund raiser for the local charity can attest. Yet when combined, the result is called blackmail and it is widely seen as a crime. But that is just the puzzle. The mystery is that over a dozen attempts to account for this puzzle have been written, and not a one of them agrees to any great extent with any other. It is as if there are a plethora of witnesses to a motor vehicle accident, each not only disagreeing with all the others, but each telling a completely different story. The enigma is that with the exception of a corporal's guard of commentators, no one has seen fit to assert the contrary: that two legal "whites" cannot make an illegal "black." This is precisely the point of the present paper. The authors maintain that since it is legal to gossip, it should therefore not be against the law to threaten to gossip, unless paid off not to do so. In a word, blackmail is a victimless crime, and must be legalized, if justice is to be attained. The authors also reply to a paper written by Scott Altman, who takes a different position. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/98032702.pdf?abstractid=83348&mirid=1 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/98032702.pdf?abstr...
- camel-cdr 3y agoDoesn't the same thing apply to bribery? I can gift you something, and I can ask you to do something. But if I do the first conditioned on the second it's bribery.
- OscarCunningham 3y agoThe illegal thing about bribery is that you give money to an individual for them to do something on behalf of an organisation. Paying someone to do something isn't illegal, but you're harming the organisation by encouraging the individual to act differently than in the best interests of the organisation.
- hsbauauvhabzb 3y agoIs bribery legal when the two parties are entirely private entities (not law enforcement, not publicly listed, etc)? Is it still illegal if you own the entity? Presumably it would often be tax fraud, but an intangible assets maybe not so much? Aren’t intangible assets and ‘horse trading’ the fundamental underpinnings of politics?
- OscarCunningham 3y agoAs far as I know, the word 'bribery' is defined by the fact that the person you're paying has some duty to someone else. Otherwise it's just normal paying someone for something.
- mannykannot 3y agoIn this analogy, it is the official demanding the bribe who corresponds to a blackmailer, and that is generally a crime. In many cases, a bribe is demanded in order to have done what should be done anyway. More generally, one cannot, in practice, blackmail someone over a harmless fact. This is so even if no one but the victim regards the fact as having any importance.
- OscarCunningham 3y ago
- AmericanChopper 3y agoBlackmail is a stupid crime, because you could basically always do it in a way that doesn’t fit the definition of the crime. The threat never has to be directly made, and the offer never has to be directly associated with it. Only the clumsiest blackmail practitioner would ever find themselves creating evidence of a blackmail crime.
- lolc 3y agoBasic evidence is that the victim makes a connection between the threat and the offer. It is illegal to cause this connection. One can try plausible deniability but it's a gamble. Very smart people get convicted on circumstational evidence.
- AmericanChopper 3y agoThe threat is a necessary element of the crime. To convict somebody of extortion or blackmail you have to prove that the threat occurred, and that the accused intended to make the threat (which is slightly different in the case of extortion via intimidation rather than threat). Extortion is not a strict liability crime, and the interpretation you've provided doesn't account for the mens rea requirement. If your interpretation was true, then extortion or blackmail would just be a feeling that anybody could have at any time.
- lolc 3y agoYes my wording was incomplete. It requires intent, just causing the connection is not enough. What I wanted to say is that it's hard not to leave evidence of one's intent. And be it circumstantial. So while I'm sure a lot of blackmail happens with most cases never reaching the courts, I'm also sure that even people who are smart about it run the risk of a conviction.
- AmericanChopper 3y agoBut you still need an actual threat, not just a theory that a person intended for a threat to be implied. If everybody understands the potential consequences of not complying, then a threat isn’t necessarily required.
- kazinator 3y ago> Blackmail consists of two things, each indisputably legal on their own; yet, when combined in a single act, the result is considered a crime. A stabbing consists of someone's torso and someone's knife occupying the same space at the same time. Each is fine on its own, though!
- robnado 3y agoI believe it is the transfer of the knife into the space occupied by the torso and the intent to do so that is illegal. If the torso moves into the space occupied by the knife on its own, it’s an unfortunate accident. If the torso moves into the space intentionally, it is self-harm or suicide depending on outcome and where the knofe intersects the torso.
- seanhunter 3y agoWhat a pathetic straw man of a paper. It’s transparently obvious that blackmail is not a victimless crime given it’s not hard to identify who the victim is in a case of blackmail. Secondly their argument (blackmail comprises two parts each of which is legal on its own and therefore should be legal when done together) is both untrue on its face and fails given there are lots of things which are legal in isolation that are illegal together (eg it’s legal to buy alcohol, it’s legal to be 16, it’s not legal to be 16 and buy alcohol. It’s legal to drink, it’s legal to ride a motorcycle, it’s not legal to ride a motorcycle when you have been drinking etc). It’s untrue on its face given that the threat part of blackmail may well be illegal on its own and the reveal of the information may be illegal depending on what the information is and how it was obtained..
- landoftheice 3y ago[dead]
- Closi 3y agoThere is also an assumption in the paper that the information would be released without the blackmail, and that blackmail is just a commercial-option to 'stop' the information release for the benefit of both parties. This is wrong for at least two reasons: 1. The information may not have been released because the secret-holder did not have an incentive to release it, however in a 'blackmail-legal' world there is now a new incentive to threaten to release the information. 2. If blackmail is illegal, it also incentivises others to go and find secrets that they can then exploit for money/sex/other. Paper even resorts to effectively calling Sam a facist at one point because he is against the free market(!). I think the below excerpt of the paper sums up the papers (radical) free-market views: > Altman asserts that "charging poison victims who face imminent death more for medication than one would charge less desperate purchasers of the same drug exploits their hardships." [however] he doesn't seem to realize that those societies which allow free enterprise [...] are far more likely to have medicines that will save lives than ones which embrace socialism, regulationism, interventionism and [which represent] the fascist model favored by Altman. I didn't know the idea that you shouldn't charge someone who is poisoned more for antidote was considered fascist or even particularly socialist!
- ofirg 3y agoBlackmail is often restricted to publishing information regarding an illegel activity, not just an embarrassing one, in which case the public is the victim of both the potential coverup and the discriminatory enforcement of the law.
- ilynd 3y agoInsider trading, a victimless crime
- ilynd 3y agoinsider trading, a victimless crime
- teekert 3y agoHow are you not a victim if the secret is a compromising photograph? Surely, everyone is naked at times, still when secretly captured on camera, you can become a victim. (Edit: this was supposed to be a root comment)
- CookieCrumbs 3y agoBlackmail doesn't always only involve the blackmail target. There can be other victims as a result of collateral damage from the blackmailing process.
- trabant00 3y agoDrinking is legal, driving is legal, so it should be legal to combine them. trabant00, professor emeritus of mental gymnastics. Plz give money for study and paper. There's plenty of things that are legal except if done in a certain way, at a certain time, with certain persons, circumstances, etc. In fact I would argue most things are legal in a limited scope than things that are legal in any circumstance. And in the case of blackmail there's not just the two, unless you ignore the mother freaking THREAT. You are threatening somebody, that alone makes them a victim.
- OscarCunningham 3y agoThe thing is that in other cases you are allowed to threaten with legal actions. For example if I have permission to build on some land that would block your view, then I can ask you to pay to prevent me from doing this.
- trabant00 3y agoYou missed the entire part about context. Threatening with legal action does not make a victim, while threatening with something illegal like blackmail does. In your example you aren't asking for money not to hurt them, like with blackmail. You are asking for money to give up your legal right to do something. Intent also counts in law.
- OscarCunningham 3y agoBlackmail isn't threatening with something illegal. You have a legal right to reveal embarrassing information about someone.
- trabant00 3y ago> You have a legal right to reveal embarrassing information about someone Yes, but you don't have the right to threaten to do it for extortion. Again, context matters. If you still don't get it I give up.
- olalonde 3y agoShould add 1998 to the title.
- suddenclarity 3y agoI find the argument quite ridiculous, but worse, the premise seems flawed. Contrary to the authors claim, publishing humiliating information would probably fall under defamation, which is illegal. At least in my country.
- OscarCunningham 3y agoDefamation requires making false statements about someone. It's not defamation to reveal true embarrassing information.
- akerl_ 3y agoIn the US, publishing true information generally cannot be defamation.
- brabel 3y agoI think that you may even be legally bound to reveal certain true information that you've come across, regardless of whether that would be humiliating for someone (say, information about a corrupt politician taking bribes).
- akerl_ 3y agoI don't think that's the case, outside of some very specific crimes and roles (for instance, mandatory reporters of indicators of child abuse). If you're a politician and I find out you're taking bribes, I don't have a legal obligation to tell anybody. I just can't blackmail you about it.
- MereInterest 3y agoThough not stated in the abstract, I assume that the information to be published is true. In the US, truth of a statement is an absolute defense against defamation. That is, regardless of how humiliating the information is, no matter the personal embarrassment from its release, no matter my intentions in releasing it, it cannot be defamation if the information is true.
- dale_glass 3y agoThere's a very simple explanation: Rules are created to optimize outcomes, not to be logically consistent. That's it. People who think everything flows from a small set of elegant axioms are wrong. Such systems never survive contact with reality, because reality is messy and not mathematically elegant. Rules are also created by multiple parties, in multiple circumstances, and with various compromises, tradeoffs, subjectivity and intentional and accidental omissions built in, which require later inelegant patches. The reason why blackmail is illegal though the components of it are fine is because we've seen that it leads to very suboptimal outcomes. It allows one to wield far more power than one would legitimately wield. If you reveal something embarrassing or illegal about your boss, your boss may be replaced with someone else. If you try to make an agreement with your boss without blackmail material you usually get a "fair" negotiation and outcome. The combination of both allows you to wield power you never could otherwise. And in general a situation where people who do stuff like installing spyware or digging through somebody else's garbage manage to usurp authority isn't a good one.
- CookieCrumbs 3y ago> It allows one to wield far more power than one would legitimately wield. Historically, even law could not stop this if the blackmail material was damaging enough and the targets powerful enough.
- KingMob 3y agoIs this what passes for "insight" in economics nowadays? Can't wait to hear this author use the same logic elsewhere. "It's legal to wish for someone's death, and legal to hand over briefcases full of cash. In this paper I will demonstrate how hiring a hitman is, in fact, ..." or "It's well-known that hydrogen is an explosive gas, and oxygen is an explosive gas, Q.E.D., the author maintains that the chemical H2O should in fact, also be considered an explosive gas."
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoIt's someone with a passing knowledge of logic and expecting justice to work like boolean logic (a && b = true but the current legal system says it's false!)
- Closi 3y agoOr people expecting their field gives them infinite knowledge in another. These are both authors from a business school, and it shows. It basically says "In this essay we will use the economic theories of Adam Smith to show why something should be ethically ok from a philosophy of law perspective".
- Closi 3y ago> Can't wait to hear this author use the same logic elsewhere. It doesn’t look pretty - he has written a book with the same logic about how discrimination based on sex, race and sexuality is totally fine.
- Closi 3y agoThis paper seems to have too much 'whataboutism'. Sam says that we shouldn't exploit poisoned people by charging lots of money for an antitode, and the paper literally responds by calling him in favour of a 'fascist model' of society rather than being for free-enterprise. Talk about being a straw man!
- phkahler 3y ago>> calling him in favour of a 'fascist model' of society rather than being for free-enterprise. So they think free enterprise includes unchecked exploitation of vulnerable people. That sounds like a lot of tech companies, from raising drug prices 20x, to Uber and DoorDash, data collection, right to repair issues, most SaaS, centralized "pricing software", DRM, heated seats as a service, etc... They should keep writing this stuff and get the message out to the public. People will start voting in favor of "free enterprise" for sure. Freedom to exploit others is a perversion of the word freedom.
- techdragon 3y agoHaving read through it I was disappointed in their decision to barely to engage with the potential solution to the paradox that would result from the development of a legal construct of “criminal coercion”, they touch on coercion a few times but don’t dig in as they’re not focused on suggesting such a thing (it’s certainly not their job to as the authors they are free to decide the remit of their paper after all) … but I feel the concept of “criminal coercion” is a powerful potential fix to a lot of modern problems. If one party has sufficient power via any means that they can coerce and control their other party, at some point (the hard part is deciding where this point is) the coercive nature switches from being “normal life in a capitalist society under the rule of law” (a phrase I’m using to try and cover all the forms of coercion that we kind of have to live with, eg cops and the law) to being “criminal coercion”. There’s obviously a massive argument as to what the cut off should be, but the concept is simple and feels morally justified which is a good start.
- techdragon 3y agoHaving read through it I was disappointed in their decision to barely to engage with the potential solution to the paradox that would result from the development of a legal construct of “criminal coercion”, they touch on coercion a few times but don’t dig in as they’re not focused on suggesting such a thing (it’s certainly not their job to as the authors they are free to decide the remit of their paper after all) … but I feel the concept of “criminal coercion” is a powerful potential fix to a lot of modern problems. If one party has sufficient power via any means that they can coerce and control their other party, at some point (the hard part is deciding where this point is) the coercive nature switches from being “normal life in a capitalist society under the rule of law” (a phrase I’m using to try and cover all the forms of coercion that we kind of have to live with, eg cops and the law) to being “criminal coercion”. There’s obviously a massive argument as to what the cut off should be, but the concept is simple and feels morally justified which is a good start. It’s not perfect but it’s a good start at least, unlike the “let’s just make blackmail legal because… etc..” attitude that keeps coming up in the paper.
- rzl1113 3y ago[flagged]
- sublinear 3y agoI'll bite. Was canceling celebrities throughout the 2010s victimless?
- mannykannot 3y agoI'm curious as to why you think this particular question is relevant to this particular discussion. I hope there is more to it than the presence of 'victimless' in the title.
- CookieCrumbs 3y agoYes, celebrities don't count as human
- rzl1113 3y ago[flagged]
- rzl1113 3y ago[flagged]
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoThis just seems fallacious. It's not illegal to pick up an item in the store, and it's not illegal to walk out of a store, therefore shoplifting is a victimless crime and should be allowed? It reminds me of "Affirmative conclusion from a negative premise" (https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Affirmative_conclusion_from_a_negative_premise https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Affirmative_conclusion_from_a_...) or an inverse "two wrongs don't make a right" (two rights do not make a wrong?)
- CookieCrumbs 3y agoDeliberately setting up an environment to blackmail people in is definitely not a victimless crime.
- Connor_Creegan1 3y ago[dead]
- CookieCrumbs 3y agoLiterally none of this matters by the way. Within the next 10 years, any form of blackmail is going to be falsifiable due to generative AI. Anyone who has been blackmailed will have plausible deniability if their blackmailer decides to release the blackmail material itself.