Or even better, folks actively trying to screw the market manipulators.

Again, no. If some drug company killed a single person with a weird side effect that they buried, do you think it'll be discovered, much less prosecuted? The Sacklers got prosecuted because the opiod epidemic was huge, not because they passed some magical threshold so it's magically fine.

> What do you think the chances of being caught shoplifting is? If it's less than 50-33%, then you have the same problem as the OP where it makes sense to shoplift.

Don't we already? Police and DAs at least here in California are not serious about punishing shoplifters AFAICT. I hear people say this is specifically because of the 2014 Proposition 47 (raising the threshold for felony theft from $400 to $950). Not sure that's true (misdemeanor theft can still be punished by up to six months of jail time and/or up to a $1,000 fine, and California's current thresholds are similar to other states) but there was a federal mandate to address prison overcrowding, and California chose to do that by not having as many prisoners instead of building a ton more prisons. Prop 47, and perhaps some policy changes made with far less fanfare, were intended to achieve that.

There's still more deterrent for misdemeanor shoplifting than for nationwide egg price-fixing though!

The general public isn’t that relentlessly amoral.

There is a whole area of research on this. Prosecutors have significant discretion around charging and (suggested) sentence, and this allows bias to creep in. I've heard people debate the quality of specific research on the size of the bias, but not the mere idea that bias is possible at all.

1) they can be selective with which arrests result in charges

2) prosecutors can tell police straight up what they will or won’t prosecute, which affects what crimes cops will investigate or make an arrest for

They get to pick the sentencing they are aiming for, and that can depend on race.

Prosecutors confront ugly repercussions of bias - https://www.americanbar.org/news/abanews/aba-news-archives/2... - February 3rd, 2023

> The pervasive problems with racism in our criminal justice system has been clear. Black Americans are incarcerated in state prisons at nearly five times the rate of white Americans.

> The systemic racism in the system starts before the first contact and continues through charging decisions, plea deals, conviction, sentencing recommendations, incarceration, release and beyond.

They have discretion to not prosecute. I was nearly killed and left with significant injuries. The police conspired to undercharge and the prosecutor DGAF.

They absolutely get to pick. They pick which cases they choose to prosecute, plea bargain, or dismiss, as well as what sentence they choose to ask for.

sure, prison time for some criminal stuff is cool too.

i am more pushing back against the call for corporal punishment like caning

Sort of True-ish. There are lots of different kinds of ownership. Ownership with little to no say in how things are run to ownership with basically all the control.

If you are an owner with all the control, i.e. you are on the board or in corporate leadership(CEO/CFO/etc), then hey guess what,there is a really great cell here at the local prison just waiting for you, depending on how involved you were.

If you are an owner with little to no control, i.e. most shareholders that just vote for the board, etc. The assets would get liquidated, bond/debt holders would get paid back, and then anything left over would go to these shareholders.

This would incentivize shareholders to care more about what they are owning, this is a good thing. Even if it's pension funds and individual retirement accounts. This would get sorted pretty quickly as soon as the new normal is known and adjusted for.

SpaceX for example just went public, but if you read the docs, the control was not given to the public. Elon Musk 100% controls SpaceX still. Even if every public shareholder unanimously agrees against Elon Musk, guess what happens? Elon Musk still gets his way.

I don't know what the parent comment was thinking, but to my mind, the ones with the most control get the worst of the consequences. So Pension Funds/etc that hold little to no control would get paid out before those with more control.

Arguably that is worse. If a criminal misuses his own resources to commit crimes and then you take that away from them, it only affects him.

The companies should be liquidated still. That would put the incentives in the correct order.

Yet another issue with the modern US iteration of capitalism. The intentional design of the US stock market for people to depend on it for retirement, instead of getting enough wages to save their money risk-free or with government benefits.

Pushing 401k and IRA, making it so that's the only viable way (other than having a high-6-digit wage) to live comfortably in retirement, is a detriment to a healthy society.

2?

2?!

I can easily think of lots of corruption of the following: Trump, Biden, Trump, Obama, W Bush, Clinton, H Bush, Reagan.

Everybody follows neoliberal economics, and enables loads of corruption for their friends, families, and allies. All of them did that.

They ALL have been corrupt. The target of who the corruption is for changes.

> That famous McDonalds hot coffee case, McDonalds had caused serious injuries to hundreds of people previously and demonstrated serious negligence and a willing disregard for the safety of their customers and the courts, and yet when the jury came back with a couple million dollars in punitive damages, the judge still massively reduced that penalty!

And then in the aftermath of that, the media turned the most well-known victim into a punchline and an oft-cited example of absurd litigation by people who don't know any better.

xkcd (2130) continues to be unreasonably poignant, as usual.

LIBOR didn't triple the rate. I don't doubt that they screwed around at the margins but the extreme volatility in egg prices were predominantly caused by the underlying economic factors.