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No, but it seems "fair" that the looters and criminals don't get punished. If we choose to not enforce the law for some, we're choosing not to enforce the law period.

If society wants the laws to not apply to corporations beyond some market capitalization, we'll have to explicitly write that into the laws.



> No, but it seems "fair" that the looters and criminals don't get punished. If we choose to not enforce the law for some, we're choosing not to enforce the law period.

What's your line of reasoning here? Because we're not properly enforcing civil judgements on J&J, it's therefore "fair" for unrelated people to suffer losses, and for criminals to commit property crimes with impunity? If I pulled a gun on you right now and demanded that you hand me your phone and laptop, would you also consider that fair for the same reason?


If the law doesn't protect regular folks, regular folks won't (and shouldn't) respect the law. Living in the Wild West is unfair in many ways, but living in a kleptocracy is even more so.


> If I pulled a gun on you right now and demanded that you hand me your phone and laptop, would you also consider that fair for the same reason?

Pretty sure threatening to shoot and shooting someone is not merely a property crime. Especially not one against a business, which seems to be critical to the context here.

A better comparison that would related to what we likely do around here would be something like "I 'hack' into your Git server and copy your source code and ransom it off." This is also criminal.

Indeed, if you want to change the scope and context, then one could argue that companies are already out there killing people, and by participating and supporting the system that upholds the companies doing that, you are therefore contributing to that killing. Meaning you are not innocent. But I wouldn't want to do that, so let's not.


>Pretty sure threatening to shoot and shooting someone is not merely a property crime. Especially not one against a business, which seems to be critical to the context here.

Fair point. How about I burgle your house instead?


Sure, then it should seem fair that when I sit in my bagel shop and shoot people who break out my windows that the law does not punish me.

Come on this is a downward spiral that we don't want to get started on right?


That's the point. We don't want to abandon the law, therefore we must not allow corporation to get away with obvious law-breaking.


There has to be some limitation to this principle when you live in a country of 350 million plus individuals.




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