zlacker

Sometimes we do exactly that. In general, if someone is trying to kill you, you are allowed to try and kill them right back. It's self-defense.

If you're talking about legalizing vigilantism, you would then have to argue that this is a better system and less prone to abuse than some variant of the existing law enforcement apparatus. Which, if you could do it, would imply that we actually should do that. But in general vigilantes have serious problems with accurately identifying targets and collateral damage.

>>Anthon+(OP)
Not quite my line of thinking but appreciate the reply. There's definitely an interesting debate to be had there about the difference between "legalizing vigilantism" and "not protecting criminals" (one that's been done to death in "hack back" debates).

It gets messy because, by definition the moment you remove the laws, the parties cease to be criminals... hence my Bushism "wrongdoers" (can't quite bring myself to say evil-doers :)

One hopes that "criminals" without explicit legal protection become disinclined to act, rather than become victims themselves. Hence my allusion to "nature", as in "Natural Law".

"Might is right" is no good situation either. But I feel there's a time and place for tactical selective removal of protectionism (and I am thinking giant corporations here) to re-balance things.

As a tepid example (not really relevant to this thread), keep copyright laws in place but only allow individuals to enforce them.

>>nonran+e2
If you want a fun one in that line, allow piercing the corporate veil by default until you get to a human. Want to scatter conglomerates to the wind? Make the parent corporation fully liable for the sins of every subsidiary.

>>Anthon+f3
Good ones. Nice to shake up this thinking. We need more courageous legal exceptionalism to redistribute power and deal with complexity.

I've just finished recording a Cybershow episode with two experts in compliance (ISO42001 coming on the AI regulatory side - to be broadcast in January).

The conversation turned to what carrots can be used instead of sticks? Problem being that large corps simply incorporate huge fines as the cost of doing business (that probably is relevant to this thread)

So to legally innovate, instead, give assistance (legal aid, expert advisor) to smaller firms struggling with compliance. After all governments want companies to comply. It's not a punitive game.

Big companies pay their own way.

>>Anthon+f3
I wonder what the world would be like if we took corporate personhood to its logical conclusion and applied the same punishments to corporations as we apply to people.

You can’t really put a corporation in jail, but you could cut it off from the world in the same way that a person in jail is cut off. Suspend the business for the duration of the sentence. Steal a few thousand bucks? Get shut down for six months, or whatever that sentence would be.

>>wat100+J9
>You can’t really put a corporation in jail, but you could cut it off from the world in the same way that a person in jail is cut off.

I have imagined a sci-fi skit where James works at CorpCo, a company that was caught doing something illegal and sentences to prison. As punishment James goes to work by reporting in at a prison at 8 am. He sits in his cell until his 'work day' is over and it's released at 5 pm to go home. It's boring, but hey, it pays well.

>>nonran+W4
The trouble is that governments might not have a bias towards any company, but the government employees doing everything do. If the government is handing out a lot of assistance then you get a layer of middlemen who will help companies "get things done". The issue with this is that they are an additional burden that suck out resources from the system.

>>Aerroo+gr
I think you can put the CEO and board in prison though.

>>Aerroo+xr
I think on balance there's a net gain in value. Enabling new companies to navigate burdensome regulation contributes to the economy in the long run. If money is a problem big companies who made the regulation necessary with their ill behaviour can subsidise the entry of competitors. I think people are starting to call that "coopertition" as a idea somewhere between taxation and corporate social responsibility.

>>wat100+J9
Corporate death penalty [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_dissolution

>>nonran+MI
One of the major things governments should be doing and largely aren't is publishing open source software (e.g. BSD license) for regulatory compliance. Not just a tax filing website, the actual rules engine that some government lawyers have certified as producing legally-compliant filings.

The point being to allow members of the public to submit a pull request and have their contributions incorporated into the officially-certified codebase if it's accepted, so the code ends up being actually good because the users (i.e. the public) are given the opportunity to fix what irks them.