I am pretty against the death penalty for people too. But corporations are particularly immoral, and I feel that if anything, we should be vastly more comfortable executing companies than people.
I think personal accountability for CEOs and executives would help a lot. A CEO who knew an illegal business move might land them in jail would be much more hesitant to do it than a CEO that knew that move might cost investors some stock value.
But I also think a company's behavior can be endemic and cultural, and that perhaps rather than trying to turn them around, we should just "execute" them. Shut down operations, auction off property to pay any debtors and assist employees with the transition elsewhere.
One of the things I think about with Big Tech is that they are incredibly overvalued on their "too big to fail" status... that and the current reality that their illegal gains won't be meaningfully seized. If a company could be "executed" for it's misdeeds, investors would need to be real about the value of "rulebreaker" type companies, and the additional risk they carry. We'd not be in the situation we are now, where the crimes of Google and it's executives keep racking up... but so is it's stock price.
I don't buy the claim that we need to limit liability in order to foster innovation, because our limited regulation has led these companies to squander so much innovation, it's insane. For every innovative thing one of these tech companies has done, it's killed dozens or hundreds of startups that were doing something more innovative and not focused on circling the wagons around their core stock value.
I think personal accountability for CEOs and executives would help a lot. A CEO who knew an illegal business move might land them in jail would be much more hesitant to do it than a CEO that knew that move might cost investors some stock value.
But I also think a company's behavior can be endemic and cultural, and that perhaps rather than trying to turn them around, we should just "execute" them. Shut down operations, auction off property to pay any debtors and assist employees with the transition elsewhere.
One of the things I think about with Big Tech is that they are incredibly overvalued on their "too big to fail" status... that and the current reality that their illegal gains won't be meaningfully seized. If a company could be "executed" for it's misdeeds, investors would need to be real about the value of "rulebreaker" type companies, and the additional risk they carry. We'd not be in the situation we are now, where the crimes of Google and it's executives keep racking up... but so is it's stock price.
I don't buy the claim that we need to limit liability in order to foster innovation, because our limited regulation has led these companies to squander so much innovation, it's insane. For every innovative thing one of these tech companies has done, it's killed dozens or hundreds of startups that were doing something more innovative and not focused on circling the wagons around their core stock value.