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One issue about this proposal is with the incentive gradient. The penalties you are proposing seem sufficient to be ruinous to perpetrators, not on the "shucks, guess that business venture failed" level but on the "I have to give up my previous life" one. We know from revealed preference that people are willing to take on significant risks of significant jail time for amounts of wealth that are smaller than something that makes a difference between their current socioeconomic status and a lower one (shoplifting, fraud, violent spats over loaned money...). It stands to reason that if the penalty for a set with as high coverage as {insults that hit the mark, minor tort, minor annoyances, white-collar bookkeeping trickery that passed some arbitrary threshold} is dropping out of your social stratum, then a nontrivial number of people would threaten victims into silence or even outright attempt to murder them (or even just run amok on third parties), because they'd prefer the chance of jail time to the certainty of losing $1m.
Of course, as a red-blooded law-and-order individual you could start imagining jacking up punishments and enforcement for everything else until they no longer have that preference structure, but then you very quickly run into the wall of potential disincentivisation capping at whatever value people assign to killing themselves after giving society the largest fuck-you they can muster. Maybe one day there'll be Roko's Basilisk style scifi punishments you can mete out with certainty, but until then...
Yes, I am aware of this and this is more "and that is why I am fine with Alex Jones fined into nonexistence, if this verdict will be applied" and less "that should be legislated immediately".
If I would be proposing actual law then it would be more reasonable - but still going into this direction.
But for example for predatory banks some actual penalties should be happening. It is absurd that entire sale division blatantly lies to people, companies going bankrupt and people losing their wealth - and nothing happens to people responsible for that. I consider "I have to give up my previous life" as desirable for CEOs presiding over this. Though not "and now they are homeless and starving".
Yes, that is a risk. "You lose your home if you hit pedestrian" may end with China-style "we hit pedestrian? lets be sure that they end dead".
Again, it is more personal emotional reaction that ready legislation. In such cases I put much more effort and thinking into that (and what I got passed was extremely minor compared to what is discussed here, and I put much more effort into it)
That would be unlikely to work, the problem is that many people outright ignore potential negative consequences. I am thinking more about compensation to victims than deterrence.
What happens if the predatory bank is enabled by someone else? If your high-risk clients are minorities and the government says that if you don't lend to them, you get shut down for discrimination, and then a lot of those high-risk clients default on their loans, is it really fair to make the banks pay?
Have bank lied to them and promised that defaulting is impossible, taking loans has no risks or deliberately mislead them into this? Are they blatantly lying about lack of risk? Are they telling them to disregard mandatory disclosure of risk? Are they promising that they will repay less or the same despite that real interest is >0? If no then it does not really apply.
Though bank would have a problem if doing this would be needed to reach some diversity ratio or something.
And obviously, "the government says that if you don't lend to them, you get shut down for discrimination" is stupid and should be fixed. And yes, I know that it is easy to say.
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I think this scenario you are painting is still a lot more specific and limited in scope than what I'm thinking of. People who feel like society treats them unfairly, or even that society has announced its intention to treat them unfairly - which, as hard as this may be for you to theory-of-mind into, will in your proposal include the sketchy businessmen who merely consider running robocall spam campaigns and choleric and borderline people who casually slander others on a daily basis and think it's just how they express themselves - often respond by general refusal to engage in prosocial behaviour, as exemplified by cases ranging in scale from bounded-scope ones such as "triumphalist copyright laws result in software/music pirates who laugh in your face if you make moral arguments about the wellbeing of content creators" (that's me, too!) to pretty general ones like "minority that believes it is being discriminated against will steal and vandalise anything the moment the eyes of the state are looking away".
As it stands, even a pyramid scheme operator will probably stop to help an injured child in a dark alley; I think he would not do that if he though that society's preferred fate for himself violated his sense of justice. I doubt you can run a society with too many people who will not do anything prosocial unless a policeman is standing next to them without it turning into a third-world hellhole.
My expectation is that pyramid scheme fraudsters (and similar) behaving even less prosocially will be more than outweighted by curbing stealing that currently is de facto legal. And that sketchy businessmen will switch to other technically legal or forbidden by unenforced bans or punished but not enough things. Rather than going around and vandalising stuff because some specific scam is no longer viable.
And I disagree with this argument as it seems to be general argument against punishing any criminals short of murderers. For reasons similar as I would disagree with "As it stands, even a thief will probably stop to help an injured child in a dark alley; I think he would not do that if he though that society's preferred fate for himself violated his sense of justice." arguments against actual punishment for theft.
(I do not see a real difference between thief breaking in and causing damage of 10 000$ and stealing things worth 10 000$ and banker convincing the same person to gamble 20 000$ on "it is risk-free, ignore that standard warning template about risks" and proceeding to lose that, and I would love to see both actually punished and treated both behaviour as antisocial evil)
Though at least in USA with current asset forfeiture laws it is clear that care about such things as blocking currently legal stealing is nonexisting among lawmakers.
That is legitimate risk, but currently financial fraudsters will basically laugh at victims, fully aware that in the worst case they will lose what they stolen and get slap on the wrist as their activity was technically legal or de facto legal. Except outrageous cases like FTX where there is a decent chance for some punishment at least for some.
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