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Putting a real person in jail prevents them from going to work, so jailing a company might be sanctioning it. The thing is, companies are composed of people, a
by MathMonkeyMan 2y ago
Putting a real person in jail prevents them from going to work, so jailing a company might be sanctioning it.
The thing is, companies are composed of people, and those people can just go to another company. Real people are composed of organs, but those organs can't just move to other bodies and commit the same crimes.
So, companies are just not people and the whole idea is stupid.
- nickserv 2y agoIf you have a liver from a serial killer, and commit murder, can you blame the liver? Asking for a friend.
- FredPret 2y agoCorporate personhood is critical because how else can the company enter into any contracts or employ people. Corporate misbehaviour can be punished by fines, jail time for execs, and revocation of their business license - probably the closest thing to jail time
- danaris 2y agoWe could....just define in law that corporations can do those specific things, without explicitly tying them to a notion of "personhood". I agree that "corporate jail" doesn't make much sense, at least not in a direct analog to human jail. I think the closest you could come to "jailing" a corporation would be for the government to take temporary control of it, go through it with a fine-toothed comb to eliminate the corruption and malfeasance, and operate it for the benefit of the nation as a whole for a specified period of time, then re-privatize it in some manner as long as it wasn't some kind of a natural monopoly or necessity of modern life.
- beAbU 2y agoThat's basically nationalization, and in many countries people are extremely allergic to a government that likes to just take things. You need a bulletproof judiciary, that can rule fairly on which companies are taken over and which aren't, and all sorts of checks and balances to ensure that the government can't just abuse this ability to nationalize all the things. Even though I proposed the idea of putting companies in jail, I was doing it tongue in cheek. Ultimately fines are probably the only way to go. But the fines must be big enough in order to ensure it's an effective deterrent. It must hurt the company enough that it cannot just be considered the cost of doing business. If a company is fined enough that it must actually close down/declare bankruptcy, then that's probably the few eggs you need to break in order to make the omelette I guess. A bunch of presumably innocent employees might be hurt by this decision, but overall it's for the greater good.
- drawkward 2y agoAre you really trying to claim that the only thing that lets corporations do their thing is a legal fiction that was dreamed up by Congress? And further, that Congress could not have just enumerated corporate rights separately? That's goofy.