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seawaspA bit long, so it's hidden behind the cut.
My first post on this laid out my basic views on what government should do, and touched upon some of the things that will CHANGE what kinds of things government should, and shouldn't, be involved in. The most obvious is size. In a small group, dynamics such as personal connections to most people in the group and the mechanism of group pressure (shame, encouragement, whatever) will cause the group to generally automatically put forth effort to provide basic support. It's been shown that even our Neanderthal relatives/ancestors would support people who were badly crippled for a couple of decades, when clearly they couldn't materially contribute to the well-being of the small tribe or family group they were in.
Once you get to a country of our size, however, that kind of "small town" reliance on enough people generally doing the "right thing", simply cannot work. There are far too many people with far too few connections across the entirety of the country, and, more importantly, the CONSEQUENCES for not doing the "right thing" are too diffuse and distant for the general population to notice. When you had a small group, having the brother of Crippled Joe say "shame on you!" for suggesting you abandon Joe had a lot of force; it was even more so when Joe's brother Jack was the guy who made your spearpoints or was the best hunter and pointedly started excluding you. Nowadays, it's very easy for someone to vanish into the cracks of society and be a one line mention of "man found dead in alleyway".
So in a large society, charity -- the support of those who cannot currently (or may never) support themselves is part of the government's job. No other organization will have the reach, the resources, or the obvious responsibility to do so.
The same thing applies to other aspects of society. Addressing questions of crime and punishment cannot be left to random chance. Controlling the short-term excesses of large organizations for the long-term good of society requires governmental intervention; once again, only the overarching government will have the reach, resources, and responsibility to do this.
Naturally, there's the problem of the government ITSELF becoming a direct threat; if an organization has power, that power has to be controlled and directed or it can become a threat to everyone near it. That is the eternal challenge of government -- it needs power to do the things that must be done,. but it needs a design and structure to RESTRAIN that power to (mostly) do only those things that must and should be done.
As stated previously, the most basic purpose of government is to defend those "inalienable rights" we have stated to exist: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.
Concretely, the following are things that I see as necessary for OUR government -- here in the United States, which is where I live and work -- to do to properly care for those rights are as follows -- along with some commentary on what might need to be changed or added to make these things practical.
HEALTH: Universal healthcare. This is, to me, a no-brainer. There isn't another major country on Earth that doesn't have some form of universal healthcare. The benefits overall are huge -- easy access to healthcare reduces overall illness, increases lifespan, keeps even older people healthier, reduces costs of illness and absenteeism, and so on. These things are, of course, DIFFUSE benefits, which is why it matters much more to government and the general population than to any company. This is part of both the Life and the Pursuit of Happiness elements of the "inalienable rights".
It is an unfortunate truth that in order to achieve this -- leaving aside current political idiocies -- the entire health insurance industry will have to go. Oh, there will likely be small insurance markets for very specific purposes, but insurance as we know it will not exist in such a situation. Being practical, I don't see this as feasible without literally paying off the companies -- long-term pensions for all their long-term workers, big payments to the CEOs, etc., as they're being dissolved. Otherwise, they will fight to the literal death against this obvious and beneficial change.
DEFEND SOCIETY FROM CORPORATE SHORTSIGHTEDNESS: This is likely the hardest one to do, but it's the most pervasive -- as above, it touches on almost everything in the society. Here, what has to be done is to explicitly revise the most basic elements of corporate law so that the PRIMARY duty of a corporation is to serve its market, its SECONDARY duty is to properly support its employees/workers, and only its final, tertiary duty lies with investors.
This approach is diametrically opposed to current law, which essentially holds "the stockholders, Bob" above any and all other things. The proper approach for a corporation -- and the one often used as a corporate lie to deceive people -- is to care about what the customers, their target market, need and want. This is where the ideal of the "free market" exists -- where companies are not competing for stock prices and leveraged buyouts and such, but they're competing purely for market share based on being BETTER THAN THE COMPETITION at giving the market what it needs. That lovely ideal, alas, doesn't exist with our current system, as any decent-sized company will be guided much more by how much they can boost the stock price than by whether they can actually improve their product and draw in another percentage of the market. (this is NOT to say companies DON'T think of their market share -- they do -- but they do so much more in context of convincing the shareholders and stock market that they're doing well, than anything having to do with making customers happy.)
Prioritizing employees and workers second is necessary to encourage corporations to follow and support safety and fair pay; currently there's no immediate pressure to do so, so that -- as is well established -- corporations can, and will, ignore safety requirements and pay pittances as long as they can get away with it.
This also connects to ANOTHER change that must be made: Proportionate Penalties. If I kill someone, even by accident, I'll almost certainly go to prison. If I DON'T, there's a great chance that I'll have civil penalties of considerable size levied against me.
CORPORATE PENALTIES FOR WRONGDOING MUST SCALE WITH THE COMPANY SIZE. If you're a company with a 500 billion market cap and ten billion in cash reserves, a fine of two hundred million isn't much of an issue -- especially if the practices that led to the fine had also given you enough of a leg up in the industry to REACH that market cap and reserve. If you make billions and pay an occasional hundred million here and there, you're ahead.
Penalties IN GENERAL should scale with the entity's ability to pay. It is often said that "a fine is merely the fee for doing whatever is forbidden". This is true if fines are fixed values. If I have ten billion bucks, I don't care if you charge me fifty, or even five hundred, dollars for parking in front of a fire hydrant if parking there is convenient for me. If I'm a poor guy desperately trying to make an appointment, though, I still can't afford that fifty dollar fine. For the poor person, the fine's a huge barrier. For the rich man, it's nothing, just another minor cost of doing business.
Make it so those fines scale to what you're WORTH, and all of a sudden everyone will pay attention.
More later.
My first post on this laid out my basic views on what government should do, and touched upon some of the things that will CHANGE what kinds of things government should, and shouldn't, be involved in. The most obvious is size. In a small group, dynamics such as personal connections to most people in the group and the mechanism of group pressure (shame, encouragement, whatever) will cause the group to generally automatically put forth effort to provide basic support. It's been shown that even our Neanderthal relatives/ancestors would support people who were badly crippled for a couple of decades, when clearly they couldn't materially contribute to the well-being of the small tribe or family group they were in.
Once you get to a country of our size, however, that kind of "small town" reliance on enough people generally doing the "right thing", simply cannot work. There are far too many people with far too few connections across the entirety of the country, and, more importantly, the CONSEQUENCES for not doing the "right thing" are too diffuse and distant for the general population to notice. When you had a small group, having the brother of Crippled Joe say "shame on you!" for suggesting you abandon Joe had a lot of force; it was even more so when Joe's brother Jack was the guy who made your spearpoints or was the best hunter and pointedly started excluding you. Nowadays, it's very easy for someone to vanish into the cracks of society and be a one line mention of "man found dead in alleyway".
So in a large society, charity -- the support of those who cannot currently (or may never) support themselves is part of the government's job. No other organization will have the reach, the resources, or the obvious responsibility to do so.
The same thing applies to other aspects of society. Addressing questions of crime and punishment cannot be left to random chance. Controlling the short-term excesses of large organizations for the long-term good of society requires governmental intervention; once again, only the overarching government will have the reach, resources, and responsibility to do this.
Naturally, there's the problem of the government ITSELF becoming a direct threat; if an organization has power, that power has to be controlled and directed or it can become a threat to everyone near it. That is the eternal challenge of government -- it needs power to do the things that must be done,. but it needs a design and structure to RESTRAIN that power to (mostly) do only those things that must and should be done.
As stated previously, the most basic purpose of government is to defend those "inalienable rights" we have stated to exist: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.
Concretely, the following are things that I see as necessary for OUR government -- here in the United States, which is where I live and work -- to do to properly care for those rights are as follows -- along with some commentary on what might need to be changed or added to make these things practical.
HEALTH: Universal healthcare. This is, to me, a no-brainer. There isn't another major country on Earth that doesn't have some form of universal healthcare. The benefits overall are huge -- easy access to healthcare reduces overall illness, increases lifespan, keeps even older people healthier, reduces costs of illness and absenteeism, and so on. These things are, of course, DIFFUSE benefits, which is why it matters much more to government and the general population than to any company. This is part of both the Life and the Pursuit of Happiness elements of the "inalienable rights".
It is an unfortunate truth that in order to achieve this -- leaving aside current political idiocies -- the entire health insurance industry will have to go. Oh, there will likely be small insurance markets for very specific purposes, but insurance as we know it will not exist in such a situation. Being practical, I don't see this as feasible without literally paying off the companies -- long-term pensions for all their long-term workers, big payments to the CEOs, etc., as they're being dissolved. Otherwise, they will fight to the literal death against this obvious and beneficial change.
DEFEND SOCIETY FROM CORPORATE SHORTSIGHTEDNESS: This is likely the hardest one to do, but it's the most pervasive -- as above, it touches on almost everything in the society. Here, what has to be done is to explicitly revise the most basic elements of corporate law so that the PRIMARY duty of a corporation is to serve its market, its SECONDARY duty is to properly support its employees/workers, and only its final, tertiary duty lies with investors.
This approach is diametrically opposed to current law, which essentially holds "the stockholders, Bob" above any and all other things. The proper approach for a corporation -- and the one often used as a corporate lie to deceive people -- is to care about what the customers, their target market, need and want. This is where the ideal of the "free market" exists -- where companies are not competing for stock prices and leveraged buyouts and such, but they're competing purely for market share based on being BETTER THAN THE COMPETITION at giving the market what it needs. That lovely ideal, alas, doesn't exist with our current system, as any decent-sized company will be guided much more by how much they can boost the stock price than by whether they can actually improve their product and draw in another percentage of the market. (this is NOT to say companies DON'T think of their market share -- they do -- but they do so much more in context of convincing the shareholders and stock market that they're doing well, than anything having to do with making customers happy.)
Prioritizing employees and workers second is necessary to encourage corporations to follow and support safety and fair pay; currently there's no immediate pressure to do so, so that -- as is well established -- corporations can, and will, ignore safety requirements and pay pittances as long as they can get away with it.
This also connects to ANOTHER change that must be made: Proportionate Penalties. If I kill someone, even by accident, I'll almost certainly go to prison. If I DON'T, there's a great chance that I'll have civil penalties of considerable size levied against me.
CORPORATE PENALTIES FOR WRONGDOING MUST SCALE WITH THE COMPANY SIZE. If you're a company with a 500 billion market cap and ten billion in cash reserves, a fine of two hundred million isn't much of an issue -- especially if the practices that led to the fine had also given you enough of a leg up in the industry to REACH that market cap and reserve. If you make billions and pay an occasional hundred million here and there, you're ahead.
Penalties IN GENERAL should scale with the entity's ability to pay. It is often said that "a fine is merely the fee for doing whatever is forbidden". This is true if fines are fixed values. If I have ten billion bucks, I don't care if you charge me fifty, or even five hundred, dollars for parking in front of a fire hydrant if parking there is convenient for me. If I'm a poor guy desperately trying to make an appointment, though, I still can't afford that fifty dollar fine. For the poor person, the fine's a huge barrier. For the rich man, it's nothing, just another minor cost of doing business.
Make it so those fines scale to what you're WORTH, and all of a sudden everyone will pay attention.
More later.
no subject
Date: 2025-08-28 07:51 pm (UTC)My proposal is that penalties for various crimes should be proportional to the person's (after all, corporations are somehow legally persons*) gross annual revenue -- NOT income, profit, market capitalization, or net worth. There are several advantages to this; for example, I believe that this would help prevent companies with large cashflow but negative margins from doing something irresponsibly dangerous in order to get into the profitable zone.
The biggest disadvantage I see to this is the possibility of a rich person with no heirs, who thus has no real need to earn money, and so keeps all their money in their mattress, safe, or something with a very stable value; they would get away very lightly if they did something rotten.
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* As a side note: if corporations are persons, we should find some equivalent non-financial penalties for them. Perhaps, for example, if a human would be in prison, the corporation would be barred from doing business for X period of time, and may not fire any employees during that period. If we must have capital punishment (a proposition I am 95% certain is not true) -- well, as the bumper sticker says, "I'll believe corporations are persons when Texas executes one."
no subject
Date: 2025-08-29 01:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-31 04:06 am (UTC)