I hope I don't sound too edgy with this, but I wonder if the Western world would be a bit better off if we adopted the death penalty for billionaires defrauding people
I hope I don't sound too edgy with this, but I wonder if the Western world would be a bit better off if we adopted the death penalty for billionaires defrauding people
The death penalty seems like a step too far. Life in prison would suffice, IMO. Though from reading this article I have the suspicion that she didn't get tried and convicted because someone...
The death penalty seems like a step too far. Life in prison would suffice, IMO. Though from reading this article I have the suspicion that she didn't get tried and convicted because someone finally caught her, but because the political winds shifted and she didn't follow and/or pissed off the wrong person. She was conducting her fraud brazenly for years. Rich people don't go to jail because they commit a crime. They go to jail because someone(s) more rich/powerful than them got tired of dealing with them.
The scope of this fraud is kind of wild though:
Vietnamese law prohibits any individual from holding more than 5% of the shares in any bank. But prosecutors say that through hundreds of shell companies and people acting as her proxies, Truong My Lan actually owned more than 90% of Saigon Commercial.
They accused her of using that power to appoint her own people as managers, and then ordering them to approve hundreds of loans to the network of shell companies she controlled.
The amounts taken out are staggering. Her loans made up 93% of all the bank's lending.
According to prosecutors, over a period of three years from February 2019, she ordered her driver to withdraw 108 trillion Vietnamese dong, more than $4bn (£2.3bn) in cash from the bank, and store it in her basement.
Yeah, realistically it's just not possible to amass billions of dollars without committing some crimes. You don't even have to be willfully ruthless (although I'd wager that all of them are). At...
Yeah, realistically it's just not possible to amass billions of dollars without committing some crimes. You don't even have to be willfully ruthless (although I'd wager that all of them are). At that scale, your operation is so big, and the profit motives for the people who work for you is so strong, that processes that you're responsible for will break the law.
It's normally not a big deal for you unless you just so happen to get on a more powerful competitors bad side. At that point, the law doesn't even matter anymore. All bets are off and anything is on the table.
I agree with you in principle, but I feel like an outlier here is Taylor Swift. As far as I can tell, her empire is built on star power and savvy business decisions, not exploitation. Unless you...
Yeah, realistically it's just not possible to amass billions of dollars without committing some crimes.
I agree with you in principle, but I feel like an outlier here is Taylor Swift. As far as I can tell, her empire is built on star power and savvy business decisions, not exploitation. Unless you consider "crimes of the heart" in which case she is probably guilty.
"Taylor Swift" isn't really a person, she's a marketing concept. There are thousands of people involved in engineering the Taylor Swift brand. Part of the marketing is that she is a self-created...
"Taylor Swift" isn't really a person, she's a marketing concept. There are thousands of people involved in engineering the Taylor Swift brand. Part of the marketing is that she is a self-created artist. And she, like many other billionaires, really does have some innate talent. But like every other billionaire, her real wealth comes from the labor of others, not her own actions. Her personal contributions to the whole enterprise are a crucial, but minimal portion of all the labor performed. Just consider how many hundreds of people are involved in the performing of just one show. Then add the production, marketing, travel, sales, talent agencies, and on and on. "Taylor Swift" is a person, but she's also a brand, a huge corporation. She makes her living not by her own labor, but by leveraging the labor of thousands to multiply the value of her own efforts manyfold.
Just imagine if Taylor Swift tried to hold even a single concert all by herself, without any aid or assistance whatsoever. Imagine if she, herself, tried to book a major venue, set up the stage, handle the crowds, etc.
So is Taylor Swift an ethical billionaire? Personally, I would say no. Ultimately most of her wealth comes from the labor of others. Sure, she was entirely self-supporting at one point. But past the point where she was setting up her own shows and working small time gigs, her main source of income stopped being her own efforts and started being the labor of others. She's ultimately little different from other billionaires, except she has a better marketing department and a friendlier image.
And, like other billionaires, her wealth is her own choice. She doesn't need to be a billionaire to do what she does. For example, after her first ten million or so, more than enough to live a comfortable life without ever working again, she could have transitioned her operation to a worker-owned coop model. If she wanted to still perform at her level but without exploiting the labor of others, she could choose to do so. Maybe over time, the copyrights to her songs end up being transferred to the workers who ultimately make her stardom possible. Or, she could have simply paid her people enough that she at the end of the day makes very little money, content to live off of a "modest" ten million dollar fortune or so.
This doesn't mean that Swift is in any way worse than other artists. But it is important to remember that ultimately she isn't self-made. No billionaire is. As soon as an artist gets past the point of performing in bars and tiny venues, they start relying more and more on the labor of others. Without the labor of others, Swift would still be performing at only that level. Also, keep in mind that she was hardly pulled herself up from nothing by her own bootstraps. Yes, she had talent, but many other artists have talent and never get anywhere. She herself came from a very wealthy background and relied on family wealth and connections to get her career started. She's "self made" in the way that many other billionaires with some talent are, like Bill Gates or other tech CEOs that came from money.
Carlos Ghosn (then CEO of Nissan) did not hesitate to flee James Bond style of the Japanese government, and I doubt death penalty was on the line even. This make me remember of the Robert Badinter...
Carlos Ghosn (then CEO of Nissan) did not hesitate to flee James Bond style of the Japanese government, and I doubt death penalty was on the line even.
This make me remember of the Robert Badinter (former French Minister of Justice) argument against the death penalty. It goes like that (I'm paraphrasing / interpreting a lot for the sake of brevity) : using such an extreme measure to deter extreme events (heinous crimes, terrorism, or here defrauding an exceptionally large amount of money and people) is not going to work because the people committing those crime are already exceptional, be it in their willpower or cunning (for terrorist), or mentally instable (for stuff like passional crime). On a more positive side, we know that the fear of death does not work as a deterrence, because if it was true, we wouldn't have neither great athletes nor great soldiers.
This has been part of my personal viewpoint for a number of years now. The concept that the death penalty is useless as a deterrent. IMO if a person commits any crime "worthy" of the death...
This has been part of my personal viewpoint for a number of years now. The concept that the death penalty is useless as a deterrent.
IMO if a person commits any crime "worthy" of the death penalty, they have demonstrated that they are de-facto mentally unwell and normal rational thought has gone straight out the window. They are therefore likely incapable of properly judging their own actions and consequences, and the severity of the punishment becomes irrelevant.
There are a lot of arguments against various penalties for crimes, but this is a pretty lazy one. By this logic none of our laws make sense because people still break them and risk the penalties.
There are a lot of arguments against various penalties for crimes, but this is a pretty lazy one. By this logic none of our laws make sense because people still break them and risk the penalties.
I was kind of hoping my question would be taken literally. Why would we be better off by instituting that kind of policy? The only reference we have in this thread so far is an example where the...
I was kind of hoping my question would be taken literally. Why would we be better off by instituting that kind of policy?
The only reference we have in this thread so far is an example where the presence of the death penalty did not deter the crime. Most of what I've read suggests that increasing penalties has little effect on crime deterrence in general, but I'm sure there are some exceptions, which we could discuss if given some reference material. I think there is some evidence that ascending penalties for repeated offenses like a "three strikes" rule are effective, but that's not really applicable to this kind of situation. If the point is revenge, then I'm opposed to it.
Yes, as a general rule, deterrence relies on punishment being applied consistently, not on the harshness of the punishment. When the chances of seeing punishment are low — even if the punishment...
Yes, as a general rule, deterrence relies on punishment being applied consistently, not on the harshness of the punishment. When the chances of seeing punishment are low — even if the punishment is very harsh — risk-takers (as criminals usually are) tend to dismiss the risk. So the idea here is not to deter people through some small chance that they could be punished; it is to deter them by actually punishing them. Even a mild punishment applied consistently (e.g., a night in jail every single time you steal a dollar) is much more effective than a harsh punishment applied arbitrarily (e.g., the death penalty only after stealing billions of dollars over many years).
That being said, this woman's criminal activities certainly will be deterred when she's dead. If the goal is not general deterrence, but instead to lure criminals into believing they can get away with it while secretly amassing evidence to put them away for good in one fell swoop, then this is an effective strategy that investigators commonly employ (e.g., the FBI and Target's loss prevention team).
It seems pretty likely to me that a team has been investigating her for months or years, and that they deliberately avoided deterrence so that they could gather absolutely watertight proof against her. In fact, this might be the only strategy that will work against very powerful people who can otherwise pull strings to get themselves out of trouble. In these cases, I am quite OK with a non-deterrence-based approach designed to bring their criminal career to a sudden and overwhelming halt (although, for various philosophical reasons, I would strongly prefer to see that in the form of a lifelong prison sentence rather than the death penalty).
Proving someone didn't do something is next to impossible, and there's not enough data on multibillion dollar theft to easily make an argument one way or the other. You also must consider the...
Proving someone didn't do something is next to impossible, and there's not enough data on multibillion dollar theft to easily make an argument one way or the other.
You also must consider the actual likely hood of the penalty occurring. How do we know she didn't risk this because she assumed the death penalty wouldn't be the judgement, as the article itself says it's an insanely rare thing for women who commit white collar crimes. Perhaps if it was certain to be the death penalty she would not have done this. I don't know, because we can't know. All we know is that it's rare for the death penalty to be applied, will be applied in this case, and that they committed massive fraud.
Even the article mentions that "Some believe the death penalty is the court's way of trying to encourage her to return some of the missing billions. " in which case it's just being used as a bargaining tool and she might know that as well. There are way way way too many variables to somehow look at this and say "well why would it work, it didn't here?"
I think it's a perfectly legitimate question to ask why someone thinks their suggestion would be a good idea. This situation isn't slam dunk proof that the death penalty is a bad deterrent, but...
I think it's a perfectly legitimate question to ask why someone thinks their suggestion would be a good idea. This situation isn't slam dunk proof that the death penalty is a bad deterrent, but it's some evidence. My main point is that I think we need some evidence (or at least some substantial argument) that expansion of the death penalty would be a good idea, which we haven't gotten yet.
I've already pointed out that it's just as much evidence that the death penalty isn't used enough by your definition. Perhaps she would not have done this if death was 100% certain, not a rarity....
This situation isn't slam dunk proof that the death penalty is a bad deterrent, but it's some evidence.
I've already pointed out that it's just as much evidence that the death penalty isn't used enough by your definition. Perhaps she would not have done this if death was 100% certain, not a rarity. You are making huge assumptions on the motivations of the person involved.
You are assuming too much. The only thing I'm trying to say is the first sentence of each of my previous comments,taken literally. I'm not trying to argue any position other than that the top...
You are assuming too much. The only thing I'm trying to say is the first sentence of each of my previous comments,taken literally. I'm not trying to argue any position other than that the top level comment cannot be taken as the default position without further argument or evidence, so I'm asking for some arguments or evidence.
You literally said it was "some evidence" which I'm disagreeing with. I think it's essentially not evidence of anything for or against. It does not have the context required to make that kind of...
You literally said it was "some evidence" which I'm disagreeing with. I think it's essentially not evidence of anything for or against. It does not have the context required to make that kind of claim.
I think at some point criminals either assume they won't get caught or wildly underestimate the penalties (as @Tigress already mentioned). I have a hard time imagining someone balancing the risks...
How do we know she didn't risk this because she assumed the death penalty wouldn't be the judgement[?]
I think at some point criminals either assume they won't get caught or wildly underestimate the penalties (as @Tigress already mentioned). I have a hard time imagining someone balancing the risks and deciding, "I don't want to suffer the death penalty, but life imprisonment wouldn't be so bad."
Sure, but that's not what's being argued. We literally don't know what she thought, and we don't have a wide sample of data to aggregate anything off of. All we know is that the death penalty is...
Sure, but that's not what's being argued. We literally don't know what she thought, and we don't have a wide sample of data to aggregate anything off of. All we know is that the death penalty is rare for crimes like this, and she committed one.
The conclusion being drawn isn't supported by the evidence provided. It is just guesswork.
Heavy penalties don't deter people. What deters people is if they think they'll get caught/actually punished. So what we need to focus on is actually consistently catching and actually going...
Heavy penalties don't deter people. What deters people is if they think they'll get caught/actually punished. So what we need to focus on is actually consistently catching and actually going through with punishment (where money can't buy their way out).
Well that's the issue, isn't it? The law doesn't apply to powerful people. That's the case everywhere. You're quite literally above the law if you're rich or powerful enough. What is written down...
Well that's the issue, isn't it?
The law doesn't apply to powerful people. That's the case everywhere. You're quite literally above the law if you're rich or powerful enough.
What is written down as far as rules for what you can and cannot do stops applying to you once you have enough power. Those rules are for normal people like you and I.
The only thing that matters when you're powerful is what other powerful people think of you; ie, politics.
You can flagrantly break every law on the books in a jurisdiction. You can rape people, kill people, extort people, scam people and it doesn't matter one bit. You, or your powerful friends will either cover it up, make excuses for it, cook up a loophole for why that law doesn't apply to you, or even just straight up ignore it and pretend it didn't happen.
On the other hand, you can be a relatively law abiding billionaire, but if you piss off the wrong person with enough power, you're done, regardless of whether you did or did not commit a crime.
It doesn't matter where you live, this is how the world works. I think we, as adults intuitively know this, but there are various reasons we pretend we don't.
We like to think we live in a world where the rule of law matters, or we want to live in a place where the good guys go free and then we guys are punished, or we have our own political goals and we pretend that laws apply to these powerful people to further those goals.
At the end of the day we all understand this concept though. Laws literally don't exist for powerful people. They're a minor inconvenience at the very most.
Oh, I agree. I just don't think heavier penalties are what is going to solve it. That just punishes the little guy more while occasionally we see something like this happen. But it won't deter the...
Oh, I agree. I just don't think heavier penalties are what is going to solve it. That just punishes the little guy more while occasionally we see something like this happen. But it won't deter the other rich people cause they recognize the problem wasn't that she did the thing, it was that she pissed off the wrong people.
I hope I don't sound too edgy with this, but I wonder if the Western world would be a bit better off if we adopted the death penalty for billionaires defrauding people
The death penalty seems like a step too far. Life in prison would suffice, IMO. Though from reading this article I have the suspicion that she didn't get tried and convicted because someone finally caught her, but because the political winds shifted and she didn't follow and/or pissed off the wrong person. She was conducting her fraud brazenly for years. Rich people don't go to jail because they commit a crime. They go to jail because someone(s) more rich/powerful than them got tired of dealing with them.
The scope of this fraud is kind of wild though:
Yeah, realistically it's just not possible to amass billions of dollars without committing some crimes. You don't even have to be willfully ruthless (although I'd wager that all of them are). At that scale, your operation is so big, and the profit motives for the people who work for you is so strong, that processes that you're responsible for will break the law.
It's normally not a big deal for you unless you just so happen to get on a more powerful competitors bad side. At that point, the law doesn't even matter anymore. All bets are off and anything is on the table.
I agree with you in principle, but I feel like an outlier here is Taylor Swift. As far as I can tell, her empire is built on star power and savvy business decisions, not exploitation. Unless you consider "crimes of the heart" in which case she is probably guilty.
"Taylor Swift" isn't really a person, she's a marketing concept. There are thousands of people involved in engineering the Taylor Swift brand. Part of the marketing is that she is a self-created artist. And she, like many other billionaires, really does have some innate talent. But like every other billionaire, her real wealth comes from the labor of others, not her own actions. Her personal contributions to the whole enterprise are a crucial, but minimal portion of all the labor performed. Just consider how many hundreds of people are involved in the performing of just one show. Then add the production, marketing, travel, sales, talent agencies, and on and on. "Taylor Swift" is a person, but she's also a brand, a huge corporation. She makes her living not by her own labor, but by leveraging the labor of thousands to multiply the value of her own efforts manyfold.
Just imagine if Taylor Swift tried to hold even a single concert all by herself, without any aid or assistance whatsoever. Imagine if she, herself, tried to book a major venue, set up the stage, handle the crowds, etc.
So is Taylor Swift an ethical billionaire? Personally, I would say no. Ultimately most of her wealth comes from the labor of others. Sure, she was entirely self-supporting at one point. But past the point where she was setting up her own shows and working small time gigs, her main source of income stopped being her own efforts and started being the labor of others. She's ultimately little different from other billionaires, except she has a better marketing department and a friendlier image.
And, like other billionaires, her wealth is her own choice. She doesn't need to be a billionaire to do what she does. For example, after her first ten million or so, more than enough to live a comfortable life without ever working again, she could have transitioned her operation to a worker-owned coop model. If she wanted to still perform at her level but without exploiting the labor of others, she could choose to do so. Maybe over time, the copyrights to her songs end up being transferred to the workers who ultimately make her stardom possible. Or, she could have simply paid her people enough that she at the end of the day makes very little money, content to live off of a "modest" ten million dollar fortune or so.
This doesn't mean that Swift is in any way worse than other artists. But it is important to remember that ultimately she isn't self-made. No billionaire is. As soon as an artist gets past the point of performing in bars and tiny venues, they start relying more and more on the labor of others. Without the labor of others, Swift would still be performing at only that level. Also, keep in mind that she was hardly pulled herself up from nothing by her own bootstraps. Yes, she had talent, but many other artists have talent and never get anywhere. She herself came from a very wealthy background and relied on family wealth and connections to get her career started. She's "self made" in the way that many other billionaires with some talent are, like Bill Gates or other tech CEOs that came from money.
Why do you think it would help? It didn't deter this person.
Carlos Ghosn (then CEO of Nissan) did not hesitate to flee James Bond style of the Japanese government, and I doubt death penalty was on the line even.
This make me remember of the Robert Badinter (former French Minister of Justice) argument against the death penalty. It goes like that (I'm paraphrasing / interpreting a lot for the sake of brevity) : using such an extreme measure to deter extreme events (heinous crimes, terrorism, or here defrauding an exceptionally large amount of money and people) is not going to work because the people committing those crime are already exceptional, be it in their willpower or cunning (for terrorist), or mentally instable (for stuff like passional crime). On a more positive side, we know that the fear of death does not work as a deterrence, because if it was true, we wouldn't have neither great athletes nor great soldiers.
This has been part of my personal viewpoint for a number of years now. The concept that the death penalty is useless as a deterrent.
IMO if a person commits any crime "worthy" of the death penalty, they have demonstrated that they are de-facto mentally unwell and normal rational thought has gone straight out the window. They are therefore likely incapable of properly judging their own actions and consequences, and the severity of the punishment becomes irrelevant.
There are a lot of arguments against various penalties for crimes, but this is a pretty lazy one. By this logic none of our laws make sense because people still break them and risk the penalties.
I was kind of hoping my question would be taken literally. Why would we be better off by instituting that kind of policy?
The only reference we have in this thread so far is an example where the presence of the death penalty did not deter the crime. Most of what I've read suggests that increasing penalties has little effect on crime deterrence in general, but I'm sure there are some exceptions, which we could discuss if given some reference material. I think there is some evidence that ascending penalties for repeated offenses like a "three strikes" rule are effective, but that's not really applicable to this kind of situation. If the point is revenge, then I'm opposed to it.
Yes, as a general rule, deterrence relies on punishment being applied consistently, not on the harshness of the punishment. When the chances of seeing punishment are low — even if the punishment is very harsh — risk-takers (as criminals usually are) tend to dismiss the risk. So the idea here is not to deter people through some small chance that they could be punished; it is to deter them by actually punishing them. Even a mild punishment applied consistently (e.g., a night in jail every single time you steal a dollar) is much more effective than a harsh punishment applied arbitrarily (e.g., the death penalty only after stealing billions of dollars over many years).
That being said, this woman's criminal activities certainly will be deterred when she's dead. If the goal is not general deterrence, but instead to lure criminals into believing they can get away with it while secretly amassing evidence to put them away for good in one fell swoop, then this is an effective strategy that investigators commonly employ (e.g., the FBI and Target's loss prevention team).
It seems pretty likely to me that a team has been investigating her for months or years, and that they deliberately avoided deterrence so that they could gather absolutely watertight proof against her. In fact, this might be the only strategy that will work against very powerful people who can otherwise pull strings to get themselves out of trouble. In these cases, I am quite OK with a non-deterrence-based approach designed to bring their criminal career to a sudden and overwhelming halt (although, for various philosophical reasons, I would strongly prefer to see that in the form of a lifelong prison sentence rather than the death penalty).
Proving someone didn't do something is next to impossible, and there's not enough data on multibillion dollar theft to easily make an argument one way or the other.
You also must consider the actual likely hood of the penalty occurring. How do we know she didn't risk this because she assumed the death penalty wouldn't be the judgement, as the article itself says it's an insanely rare thing for women who commit white collar crimes. Perhaps if it was certain to be the death penalty she would not have done this. I don't know, because we can't know. All we know is that it's rare for the death penalty to be applied, will be applied in this case, and that they committed massive fraud.
Even the article mentions that "Some believe the death penalty is the court's way of trying to encourage her to return some of the missing billions. " in which case it's just being used as a bargaining tool and she might know that as well. There are way way way too many variables to somehow look at this and say "well why would it work, it didn't here?"
I think it's a perfectly legitimate question to ask why someone thinks their suggestion would be a good idea. This situation isn't slam dunk proof that the death penalty is a bad deterrent, but it's some evidence. My main point is that I think we need some evidence (or at least some substantial argument) that expansion of the death penalty would be a good idea, which we haven't gotten yet.
I've already pointed out that it's just as much evidence that the death penalty isn't used enough by your definition. Perhaps she would not have done this if death was 100% certain, not a rarity. You are making huge assumptions on the motivations of the person involved.
You are assuming too much. The only thing I'm trying to say is the first sentence of each of my previous comments,taken literally. I'm not trying to argue any position other than that the top level comment cannot be taken as the default position without further argument or evidence, so I'm asking for some arguments or evidence.
You literally said it was "some evidence" which I'm disagreeing with. I think it's essentially not evidence of anything for or against. It does not have the context required to make that kind of claim.
I think at some point criminals either assume they won't get caught or wildly underestimate the penalties (as @Tigress already mentioned). I have a hard time imagining someone balancing the risks and deciding, "I don't want to suffer the death penalty, but life imprisonment wouldn't be so bad."
Sure, but that's not what's being argued. We literally don't know what she thought, and we don't have a wide sample of data to aggregate anything off of. All we know is that the death penalty is rare for crimes like this, and she committed one.
The conclusion being drawn isn't supported by the evidence provided. It is just guesswork.
I'll take too much consequences over the checks notes no consequences they have now :)
Heavy penalties don't deter people. What deters people is if they think they'll get caught/actually punished. So what we need to focus on is actually consistently catching and actually going through with punishment (where money can't buy their way out).
Well that's the issue, isn't it?
The law doesn't apply to powerful people. That's the case everywhere. You're quite literally above the law if you're rich or powerful enough.
What is written down as far as rules for what you can and cannot do stops applying to you once you have enough power. Those rules are for normal people like you and I.
The only thing that matters when you're powerful is what other powerful people think of you; ie, politics.
You can flagrantly break every law on the books in a jurisdiction. You can rape people, kill people, extort people, scam people and it doesn't matter one bit. You, or your powerful friends will either cover it up, make excuses for it, cook up a loophole for why that law doesn't apply to you, or even just straight up ignore it and pretend it didn't happen.
On the other hand, you can be a relatively law abiding billionaire, but if you piss off the wrong person with enough power, you're done, regardless of whether you did or did not commit a crime.
It doesn't matter where you live, this is how the world works. I think we, as adults intuitively know this, but there are various reasons we pretend we don't.
We like to think we live in a world where the rule of law matters, or we want to live in a place where the good guys go free and then we guys are punished, or we have our own political goals and we pretend that laws apply to these powerful people to further those goals.
At the end of the day we all understand this concept though. Laws literally don't exist for powerful people. They're a minor inconvenience at the very most.
Oh, I agree. I just don't think heavier penalties are what is going to solve it. That just punishes the little guy more while occasionally we see something like this happen. But it won't deter the other rich people cause they recognize the problem wasn't that she did the thing, it was that she pissed off the wrong people.