>Purdue is only worth a bit more than $2 billion if liquidated. The company values a proposal to settle litigation, which includes providing addiction treatment and overdose-reversing drugs, at more than $10 billion. The Sacklers would contribute $3 billion and cede control of Purdue, with the company becoming a trust run on behalf of plaintiffs.
>Those financial realities underscore that Purdue does not have enough money to satisfy the myriad claims against it.
I thought they didn't make Swiss bank accounts like they used to? e.g. FATCA means you can't really use Swiss bank accounts to hide assets any more (at least not if that bank wants to participate in the international banking system)
I've heard a good one is to get a foreign company -- one you're in cahoots with, obviously -- to sue you... and you lose. Judgements across borders generally are hands off, and there are easy ways to keep that money out of the IRS once settlements are involved.
Even if you were to get it, what would that change? The culture of consumer exploitation would still be there. How do you change something that's been a cultural cornerstone for over a century?
That implies punishing people but neither the crime nor the
workable alternatives have been clearly established.
"Exploitation" is a word so overused and often paired with many economic fallacies including feudal ones that merchants had to be ripping people off to make a profit because of the cost of transport plus a "universal fixed price" assumption.
...I mean if someone is dependent on your service and there aren't viable alternatives or a means of making a viable alternative, and your pricing is exploitative and meant to siphon away customer's money so you can get rich at their expense, maybe the issue is that you don't believe 'exploitation' exists because of how much you love money over regular people.
Those are not the definitions of those words. Neither Justice nor reparations are designed to change the culture. In fact, they're designed to do the opposite: maintain the status quo.
moving towards post scarcity economies where people aren’t struggling to acquire what they need and what they want so the motivation to do things isn’t sales numbers and profit margins
$2.2T, or it seems actually $2.15T, is the sum damage to the state economies as estimated by economists.
Yes, the strategy here is effectively just to throw out a huge number to argue that the damage done would be impossible to truly correct. But as a general principle you can't go to court and just ask for whatever number you feel like, you need to justify to the court exactly why you are owed that much. So they ran the numbers and $2.15T is what they thought they could justify.
Maybe it's like 1000-year prison terms. It does not make practical sense, but if that is how much harm the company has caused, that is how much the lawsuit would be for.
Maybe they did an unreal amount of harm. That could just be where the math adds up. If they're responsible for 100,000 overdose deaths, with each life valued at an average of $20 million, that adds up to ~$2T.
Especially when you consider those that didn't overdose but were still crippled, which is certainly at least an integer multiple of the number of deaths.
That is you problem then. They did cause that much damage to the US economy via addictions, deaths, hospital charges, lost taxes, state raising kids cause mommy and daddy are addicts etc etc..
The other side can and will challenge the damages via experts. Obviously they will not see $2 Trillion, but you ask for at least to be made whole.
There are many other claimants in the Purdue bankruptcy other than the Multistate Group mentioned here. Each of those claimants is incentivized to make their claim as large as possible to reduce the amount left over for the hospitals, Native American tribes, individual victims, and the many other groups fighting to maximize their slice of the Purdue pie. Full list of unsecured claimants is in this document: http://bankrupt11.com/dockets/documents/p_purduepharma414/
I assume to set the stage for negotiation - presumably significant costs for dealing with the destruction Purdue caused, and also wanting ongoing recovery support from them.
The article discusses how the filing cites deaths back to 1999. Over 20 years that's closer to 0.5% of yearly GDP.
> The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that the total "economic burden" of prescription opioid misuse alone in the United States is $78.5 billion a year, including the costs of healthcare, lost productivity, addiction treatment, and criminal justice involvement.
That totals $1.57T over 20 years and is purely economic, and doesn't include any value of human life.
Sounds about right, the damage was done over many years, definitely impacted US GDP, 10 percent of just one year of GDP seems actually kind of small if you consider all the trickle down economics of 250000 deaths and countless addiction related crimes and broken lives.
In what way is that evidence that the harm caused can not sum to the number given? You could also figure out how tall it would be as a stack of ones, but it's supremely irrelevant.
-Just a tad shy of 150,000 miles tall, since you ask.
(A dollar bill is .0043in thick, so unless imperial unit-challenged me messed up doing the conversions, it should be almost 2/3 of the way from Earth to The Moon.)
This would be awfully inconvenient, though - if you use $100 bills instead, you'd have a still very inconvenient, but more manageable stack of 1,500 miles.
More manageable still would be to just put the ones in a warehouse - they'd require 88M cubic feet of space, or a cube with sides of 445ft. It should fit nicely inside the Saturn V Vehicle Assembly Building.
Why would the amount sought be less than the damages? Just because they can't practically recuperate it doesn't mean they shouldn't state that it is what they are owed.
Portugal did not legalize the sale, possession, and use of drugs. For those already addicted, they changed possession from a criminal to an administrative offense. So it’s decriminalized in one aspect, but far from legal. Producing and selling drugs is still illegal and still targeted.
Their system sounds a damn sight more beneficial to society than ours, but it’s still a far cry from the “all drugs are legal” experiment being proposed here.
My instinct says that “legalize and regulate” works better for the vast majority of drugs, and “decriminalize possession but not sale or manufacture” for the rest. There wouldn’t be much call for meth if MDMA or coca products were cheap and legal. Opiates wouldn’t be spiked with fentanyl if they were regulated. This is just my guess, and I wish I had data to point to. Maybe something can be extrapolated from Portugal’s outcomes, but the situation is not the same.
For opiates a UK study found that people eventually get bored of them and quit. For other drugs it is not necessarily clear, but other experiments exist indicating it is likely the same. E.g. mice will intentionally go through withdrawals when there are enough resources available to procreate and other mice present.
Opiates in and of themselves are relatively safe, only slightly worse for you than caffeine, although clearly (arguably?) more addictive. They have very few long-term effects and the biggest negative health impact being constipation.
There's a madness in society right now, akin to the reefer madness of the early 20th century. The negative of opiates themselves have been blown ludicrously out of proportion.
I think we've cast far too negative light on opiates and too little light on the damage that's actually caused by their prohibition and thus people seeking street drugs.
We've gone so far in the wrong direction that people with actual pain are being denied opiates. People are forced to suffer in order to avoid what, constipation?
We should be both easing people off of opiates, and providing them to people in genuine pain.
>Opiates in and of themselves are relatively safe, only slightly worse for you than caffeine, although clearly (arguably?) more addictive.
I've heard this claim so much but I can't possibly comprehend the basis of it.
Virtually nobody is out there overdosing and dying of caffeine (although it does happen). It's very addictive, yes, but if you deprived someone of their coffee for a month, they'll call you an asshole but they'll go about their normal life. With opiates, people are willing to live on the streets because they're more driven to put the drug over their personal well-being. I've known people who talked about having to empty their bowels with a spoon because they can't do it normally. Withdrawal is described as absolute hell and many people accept the possibility of overdose rather than the agony of going without it. People who built up a tolerance, quit using, then return often die because they took a little beyond their current tolerance. One major long term effect is that many people find it hard to find any joy in life as great as heroin.
It's not reefer madness. Thousands are dying and people are oftentimes knowingly sacrificing their lives for opiates. The argument that it's not bad when used responsibly and in small amounts is true of virtually every drug ever. In practice, many people aren't using them responsibly, and the nature of some drugs makes them even more apt to be abused than others.
People are desperate enough to see all the examples of people dying or otherwise destroying their lives for the drug but still deciding it's worth trying. The prohibition isn't the problem. The problem is people are struggling in life and opiates are providing an out. Making them more open and available will not help, and the oft-cited example of Portugal decriminalizing drugs doesn't mean every society should make opiates available. Drug overdoses recently increased in Portugal. [1]
For some, but it's complicated. 45% of opioid addicts started with prescription opioids, but a significant number of those were prescription opioids diverted from legal sources (i.e. they were taking opioids that weren't prescribed for them).[1]
People progress from routine prescription opiates to hard-core stuff like oxycodone and fentanyl (which is also a prescription opiate) to heroin and street fentanyl. It's not saying much to point out that the terminus of the addiction process is a product that Purdue doesn't itself sell.
Fentanyl is actually a very safe opioid. It doesn't have metabolic products that can cause side effects. If I'm remembering correctly, it has a larger therapeutic index (toxic dose / therapeutic dose) than other opioid options like morphine or oxycodone.
The problem is it's incredibly potent. For an adult, you might start at 25 ug. Not a big deal when you're drawing up a 100 ug/mL solution, but it's a big problem when you're trying to eyeball a powder of unknown purity. Plus fentanyl is showing up as an adulterant in street drugs like cocaine, where no one is expecting it.
I was reading that in Canada there were seeing a number of overdoses where the blood levels of fentanyl were >200ng/L. That's an absolutely massive overdose as typical therapeutic concentrations are 1-3 ng/L. People end up needing a naloxone infusion for a day or more until their body metabolizes all of the drug.
It has also much shorter half-life than most opioids making managing the overdose much easier (in hospital setting). For anesthetic it is a valid and safe choice.
It is of course different in non-hospital setting and non-pharmaceutical grade products - since fentanyl is very potent it requires much more precision in measuring the dosage which, when combined with unknown and varying purity makes overdose much more likely than with less potent opioids. If that is in turn combined with lack of or a significant delay of naloxone administration the risk of death is significantly higher than with less potent opioids
You make it sound like there's a problem with the people getting addicted, not the systemic overprescription of addictive drugs to unwitting patients who followed the authority of naive, at best, or even malicious medical professionals.
I think he's saying that the drug war is the problem, not the addiction. That the steps that we're taking to fight addiction are worse than the addiction itself.
I would still argue the bigger problem is the way pharmaceutical companies push products on Doctors.
Ever been to a doctor's office, get prescribed a certain medicine, and then look around the office and see 5 different knick-knacks from the Pharmaco (i.e. Calendars, Notepads, general adverts) in the room as they're writing the script?
The issue is far far larger than Opioids. I think a bigger message should be sent on this issue. We are one of the only first world countries that even allows advertisement of Medications, and have repeatedly seen the impacts of these companies' marketing tactics.
An addiction is only a problem if you stop having access to the drug. It used to be the case (I don't know about now amid the anti-opioid mania) that doctors didn't bother trying to avoid opiate addiction in patients who were in their last few months of years of life. The supply is assured, the benefits are obvious, the drugs are cheap (though some opiates are expensive because of massive research spending on making them less addictive!), and the patient is never going to experience withdrawal in the context of hospice care. Alcohol withdrawal is just as unpleasant and more likely to kill you than opiate withdrawal, but for no particularly good reason you can't buy oxycodone at the corner store.
The failure is on all of us for creating a society in which being addicted to opiates will ruin your life. There's no reason this has to be the case.
The doctors and drug companies make easy scapegoats, but if a person came to you in genuine pain, living an absolutely miserable life, and you knew without a doubt you could stop it, could you in good moral standing with yourself choose to keep this human being in pain?
I certainly could not, I am not so heartless, and I certainly hope the same of my own doctors.
I think we forgot that by and large near all these people were in genuine pain. It’s easy to disparage them from the sidelines, but walk a mile in their shoes.
The whole point of having the prescription drug system is so that patients can be provided with safe, monitored access to potentially dangerous drugs. The entire purpose of a doctor being involved in the system is to prevent the outcome we are experiencing, otherwise they'd just sell these things over the counter.
Pillmill docs and counties in the rust belt being prescribed so many pills that if split evenly would give each person in the county 10k pills a month is the issue. No one is denying that sensible opioid prescriptions are a good thing. The issue is Purdue Pharma lied about how addictive their pills were and encouraged over-prescription in pursuit of their #1 goal, not easing pain, but profits.
I didn't call for banning anything. I said the issue is with overprescription and negligent doctors. You are describing a desire for proper healthcare - that is also something I am interested in.
What I am not interested in is my friend getting 100 Vicodin for a bit of pain after some dental visit (maybe wisdom teeth removed? can't remember), that he later realized was way more than he needed and had him temporarily addicted.
The high school football players hooked on vicodin are definitely "in pain". Get your wisdom teeth out? Free opiates for you. Got injured during a game? Here you go, just one won't hurt.
In the era of fentanyl, the overdose problem is largely caused by the black market nature of getting the drug, poorly mixed inactive ingredients with opiates which can have orders of magnitude difference in effective dose.
Overdose on legally manufactured drugs being much overshadowed by the black market sourced drugs.
It is difficult to come to conclusions about how much of the reactions are showboating and how much are legitimate, but it seems clear that the net negative outcomes can be minimized if you teach people about the drugs they want to take, allow them access to a reliable source, allow them access to treatment for misuse and addiction, and target the sources of suffering that lead people to try to escape with drugs.
The situation though is considerably more complex than just these points.
Here’s one, the data isn’t quite binned correctly for my argument but shows a very pronounced rise of synthetic opioid overdose deaths starting in the mid 2010s.
Overdoses themselves are relatively rare, particularly with prescribed drugs, and especially when you consider the absolutely enormous number of people on opiates.
I believe the solution is to make opiates easily, cheaply and safely available in a controlled clinical setting, much like how Portugal got their opiate problem under control. Keeps people off street drugs, thus keeping their doses reasonable and opiates out of the hands of people who are not recovering.
Overdose is most common on illegal opiates due to inconsistencies in the product itself. It's gotten worse as fentanyl has made it's way into the supply chain which dramatically alters the potency of "normal" opiates.
You may think they are completely wrong, but it is your duty to explain why you think so rather than writing a comment that provides no additional information.
They’re chickenshits driven by win rates and overburdened courts so they don’t prosecute anything that isn’t certainly won before it’s even started... while also avoiding prosecutions that might threaten jobs.
I agree. It is a shame things are this way. I wonder what the solution could be? Maybe developing an extremely educated society will help in the future mitigate this as people will have higher standards. I cannot think of anything else that will allow for natural change of this and I doubt we will see forced change by anyone.
The Sackler family should be completely liquidated. They acted with complete disregard and caused an unbelievable amount of pain. To think, there are people in prison for marijuana charges and these people still walk free. It's an absurd injustice.
I completely agree. They should be jailed, this unfortunately goes too deep. They are responsible for the death of millions. I would venture to guess close to the amount of people who die in wars
Clutching your pearls over language while these people kill hundreds of thousands and get away with it. Execution implies a legal sentence. This is a legal process. We should use it when it is appropriate.
You can't post like this to HN, regardless of how you feel about others or whom you happen to feel it about.
This is a bannable offence on HN, so please don't do it again. It's also completely unsubstantive. Fortunately that's not how your account usually posts.
Former FBI agent John Douglas argues in one of his books (I forget which one) that if general public knew the whole scope and details of the crimes perpetrated by any of the serial killers he prosecuted, the level of support against death penalty would be close to nil.
I mean, I hear all sorts of really heinous crimes…people who serially kidnap, rape, torture, kill victims in the most horrible ways possible. I am extremely doubtful that there is anything that is much worse than that, and yet I'm still against the death penalty. Perhaps he should explain what it is he sees instead of trying claim we're too ignorant to understand why the death penalty should be instituted?
Why? Why is it fair to execute someone who murders 20 hitchhikers, or 3,000 Americans on 9/11, but not someone who knowingly takes actions that lead to the death of (i.e., murders) 500,000 people?
It's not "better" to advocate for leniency (and anything less than capital punishment is leniency for these animals) -- for crimes of this magnitude it dishonors the victims. This is why societies always execute war criminals, and the Sacklers are definitely in the same category as a Saddam Hussein in the number of people killed. Hiding behind a corporation doesn't lessen the crime any more than hiding behind a government office or a military uniform.
If a political party ran on the platform of rounding up the top 1000 corporate criminals and sticking a needle in their arms they'd have my vote from President down to sheriff.
It's not fair to execute anyone. Many countries have banned the death penalty and prominent US politicians oppose it (including Biden). It seems like you're noticing:
"We execute people who murder 20 hitchhikers, but not billionaires responsible for the death of thousands."
And proposing that instead of rectifying that inequality by banning the death penalty, we rectify it by doing the death penalty way more to avoid dishonoring victims? Let me know if I'm misreading you.
That's just an opinion, and mine is different. I believe that with very few exceptions, every first-degree murderer should be executed. Note that "first-degree murderer" is NOT equivalent to "person convicted of first-degree murder" which is why I have a lot of objections to the death penalty as a matter of public policy.
How do you propose to sort out the two classes that you have indicated exist? The inability to do so perfectly is largely behind my opposition to the death penalty in general. You can't be meaningfully exonerated if you are not alive. If punishment is what people desire, the American prison system is perfectly capable of satiation. A life in an American prison is significantly worse, in my opinion, than being dead as being dead ends it immediately and life in prison forces a person to deal with the consequences of their actions for a life-time.
> I had a cat die of melamine-tainted Chinese cat food. The CEO of the company was executed.
This statement is downright wrong. The regulator was executed, not the CEO. The regulator also approved untested drugs, which killed people. The sentencing was probably not because of the cats.
It doesn't matter how bad the crime may be, as long as criminal justice is carried out by fallible humans, capital punishment will result in innocent deaths. As nice as retribution might feel, it only adds to the problem.
I feel like the death penalty does need to be on the table in very egregious cases. If you are responsible for thousands of deaths, then it is extremely improbable that the evidence against you would be anything less than overwhelming. In such cases, yes, capital punishment should be on the table.
Frankly, I am okay with having harsher penalties automatically applied to the extremely rich, including having the death penalty. Extremely rich should be defined fairly generously here, but it should be defined and treated as a separate class. Yes it creates a separate class of people, but lets be realistic -- the extremely rich already are in a separate class.
Username definitely checks out, but are you advocating for automatically harsher penalties, scaled by net worth? What problem would it solve, except for encouraging poor people to commit more crimes, since they'd now face relatively less severe?
No offence, but this reads like Tumblr "communism" propoganda gone too far.
The entire point of (Western) justice is to enforce impartially against the actions committed, not against someone's skin colour, gender, religion, or indeed, net worth.
I'm advocating for a disjoint function in terms of penalties, disjoint on net worth. I am not saying we apply a scalar factor based on a person's net worth; but I do think we do need to acknowledge that people who hold hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in wealth operate in different worlds from the rest of us. The justice system is different for them, and unless you completely get rid of money and its influence, that won't change. As such, there needs to be _some_ cutoff where we can largely all agree someone holds a disproportionate amount of wealth and power, and thus should be held to a higher standard.
I do take offense to this being called 'Tumblr communism'. Yes, Western justice systems should strive towards impartiality, but part and parcel of that is making punishments appropriate. If you fine someone making $35,000 a year $1000 dollars, you will do a lot of harm to them. If you fine someone making $35,000,000 a year $1000, they probably won't even notice. For a more practical example from my own backyard: carpool lane violators in the Bay Area. Before this pandemic, when traffic was still a thing, there would be a lot of BMWs, Audis and Mercedes violating the carpool lane. The common factor was that these were luxury cars and the owners were more likely to be able to slough off a carpool violation fine. They would rarely get ticketed, but for a lot of such drivers, even if they did, a ticket was just the price of business. On the other hand, if you were driving a '98 corolla that you could barely maintain and put the gas into, you would likely not risk a carpool violation just to save a couple of minutes, because if you did get the fine, it would be a serious impact on your finances. Because the law punished both these people the same, it made it financially viable for the wealthier people to ignore the rules, while poorer people had to follow them because they couldn't afford doing otherwise. If in this contrived scenario the punishment was scaled based on income, the fine would be sufficiently punitive for all strata of wealth, and thus no longer incentivize the more well off to break the rules.
I was somewhat haughty with my earlier words, and I don't think we should judge people differently based on net worth. After all, if you murder 10,000 people, does it matter much if you live in a palace or a cardboard box? But I do think the punishment should fit not only the crime but the person, and that the very rich should be penalized more harshly than the average person, for the same crime.
(As an aside, I'd also like to say that the username definitely does not check out. 'genocidic' is not a word, but it is meant to trip up people thinking it is and that it relates to 'genocide'. It's high school me being clever after watching Monty Python)
That is not in scope for this case. The facts of what the Sacklers have done are not in question. You can make an argument against their execution but it can't be "they got the wrong guy."
You’re not innocent if you’re convicted and the evidence is overwhelming. In this case, the evidence is overwhelming. I have no better example in recent US domestic affairs history for capital punishment being deserved.
Of course, don’t execute people when the evidence is uncertain or unclear. The evidence in this case is irrefutable, and the magnitude comparable to genocide (~250k deaths caused).
You don't think people haven't thought of that idea before? When innocent people are put to death, those involved almost always believed the evidence was absolutely certain.
The problem is: they're still sometimes wrong.
There is no known system for applying capital punishment which is infallible. They all guarantee non-zero rates of innocent death.
How many innocent people's lives should we exchange to upgrade a sentence of life-imprisonment to death? And for what benefit? A feeling of retribution?
> There is no known system for applying capital punishment which is infallible.
This is a call to implement better systems around capital punishment, not to do away with capital punishment when the crime meets the criteria for it's implementation. As the old Texan proverb goes, “Some people need killin'”. This is not a pro-death, nor pro-revenge stance, this is the understanding that some humans are evil and beyond reform (and I believe there is enough criminal justice and behavioral science evidence that supports this thesis, but is beyond the scope of this comment).
> How many innocent people's lives should we exchange to upgrade a sentence of life-imprisonment to death?
As I said, this should only be done in cases where the evidence is irrefutable. There is zero doubt in what the Sacklers did, so I see no point in us continuing to argue over whether the evidence is substantial enough. If you want to hold the position capital punishment is still not acceptable for them, I'm sure I could find enough families and loved ones of those 250k people killed by the Sacklers' actions to rebut such arguments.
> this is the understanding that some humans are evil and beyond reform
Then they can spend their entire life in prison. Capital punishment adds no additional value.
> As I said, this should only be done in cases where the evidence is irrefutable.
The bar for putting someone to death is already very high. But when you put someone to death, you may be unknowingly excluding evidence that you are not yet aware of.
In most wrongful convictions, it is additional evidence discovered after the fact or a mistake found in the evidence previously used that indicates that the person was innocent.
But at the moment of death, everyone was sure they were guilty. Whoops.
For justice to be just, mistakes must be correctable when they are found.
"Got a call from some dreamers said they was out for revenge, got excited then I thought about it, started crying, because a year ago my cousin was killed looking for his".
I'm not saying somebody should Rambo it or anything like that.
We need an equivalent of the Nuremberg Trials or the International Criminal Court but for these kinds of deliberate corporate crimes that result in mass death and destruction.
In general there needs to be more personal liability for white-collar crime. Now in corporations it often goes something like this (implicitly or not): "So you say we'll probably earn [this amount] and, when discovered, we are likely to have to pay between [this and that amount] in fines? Well then, that's a great ROI you got there, Roy. I'd say we go for it". And they lived happily after.
How about all the doctors prescribing it? Same punishment? People can't get Oxycontin unless a doctor writes a script and if they weren't handing it out like candy it wouldn't have been as big a problem.
The DEA is supposed to do it in the US as well. Each doctor has a DEA number and the DEA has access to what they prescribe. I think one issue is if you're a doctor at a pain clinic or at a hospice, you'd prescribe very large amounts of opioids. If you're a family doctor, you shouldn't be. I don't know why the DEA wasn't cracking down more quickly.
There were examples of "pill mills" where doctors were writing scripts for hundreds of thousands of pills per month, which clearly shouldn't happen.
Yeah, that's definitely true. The DEA should've picked up on that faster.
I didn't make it clear enough, but I was also trying to get at the idea that even the guidelines might be corrupt. So maybe the issue isn't even in the hands of the doctors in the first place.
I know a doctor here in Europe and he's pretty vocal about his disdain for those guidelines in his particular field (oncology). He mentions things like new and expensive medication with unclear side effects being recommended over cheap, old tried-and-tested stuff, clearly with the motivation of making more profit. And by not following the guidelines you take a huge personal risk.
Right but Purdue was behind the push for doctors to do that.
If there's evidence of doctors pushing oxy for kickbacks or something like that then I absolutely think they should be punished. It's worth investigating what the procedures/dosing/etc was and the extent of the wrongdoing.
"Companies are not people" is the best way the world has been swindled into this sort of chaos. If people profit from the company, the company is people. Purdue could entirely go down or not, but I'd much rather see the people who most benefited from it being the ones actually going down.
Companies aren't evil, they're just things. We don't jail guns for killing people, we jail people for killing people. Why in hell should this be any different when money is involved ?
The reasoning is partly, that a company is not (usually) a single person, nor is that single person responsible for all the actions of the other parts of the company. In reality, most company decisions (especially sensitive or controversial ones) are controlled by a small group of people.
That being said, it's clearly used as a flexible mithril armor for the rich and culpable. This is modern America.
There are ways to pierce the corporate veil and it mostly involves criminal activity I think. You can't form a company and murder people then claim it was the company's actions not yours.
> Companies aren't evil, they're just things. We don't jail guns for killing people, we jail people for killing people. Why in hell should this be any different when money is involved ?
The general idea goes like this. Suppose you take out a car loan from the bank, then you drive recklessly and cause more damage than you have assets or insurance. Should the victims be able to go after the bank? Only if you don't want anybody to be able to get a car loan.
And it's the same thing with corporations. Do you want your retirement account to be able to hold index funds? With unlimited liability you can forget about it, because you'd end up being a minority shareholder in everything including whatever the next company to blow up the world economy is, and thereby get wiped out.
So that's the idea. You should be able to invest in something and limit your exposure to the amount invested.
And that's not even the problem here. What we're wanting to happen here isn't to wipe out some grandma who happened to own two shares of Purdue Pharma, it's to get after the people actually responsible for doing the deed, i.e. the managers of the company who actually made the decisions rather than the non-manager shareholders. But that is, in principle, already possible. If you incorporate a murder for hire company and then try to assert corporate limited liability when they come for you, good luck with that.
The real problem is that once a company has figured out that it's going down, it can engage in a lot of complicated restructuring that makes it hard to suss out where the money has gone by the time you get around to actually pinning the liability to them. But they'd be able to do the same thing with contracts and such regardless of limited liability. It's a hard problem, and the hardness isn't where you think it is.
I should be responsible for where I put my money, and to the extent of the support I brought to whatever entity committed something illegal I should be paying for it. Isn't the market supposedly full of rational actors? Those people surely know where not to put their money then, and the others can pay for the mistake. Does that mean a lot less "safe" options are available to people wanting to put their money somewhere? Yes it does, and I would argue that's a benefit to everyone.
The difference between the loan and the investment is that I took a loan because I couldn't afford paying for it cash, otherwise there's no reason I would augment my costs and risks (although you're going to tell me that there are ways to restructure financing to come out on top, which is exactly back to my initial point). I'm basically making a sub-optimal choice that, for a rational actor, implies coercion (i.e. I have to do it in order to get to my job, for example).
Investment is money that I say I have and consciously decide to put into the system in order to make a profit, so the comparison falls flat. Why is it that we should be for example "eco-conscious" when it comes to our consumption (what you eat, what you buy, and so on) and not our investments?
The real bullshit in this system is that we've added layers where we bet on the lack of rationality of the actors while designing systems that have that (broken) assumption baked into it.
The problem is hard because we're being wilfully ignorant, not because it's magically beyond human beings.
Great summary. I don’t think people arguing for the right to sue company shareholders or company workers (without significant limitations) have thought this all the way through.
What should really happen here is that the Sacklers should be put on criminal trial for the deaths of hundreds of thousands. And every one of the executives, and even the management tier below the executives.
A fair trial will decide who is appropriately guilty, and who is not sufficiently deserving of criminal punishment.
Given the seriousness of this issue, why ain’t the congress probing these guys instead of going after a bunch of tech companies? The priorities seem to skewed here.
The Sacklers paying $3 billion is a joke. They have a net worth of $13 billion, most of which is proceeds from ostensibly an illegal drug trafficking operation targeting poor communities.
There's enough evidence of criminal behaviour by the Sackler family personally to warrant piercing the corporate veil and going after Sackler family assets.
They should be in jail. They have killed substantially more people than COVID.
>Those financial realities underscore that Purdue does not have enough money to satisfy the myriad claims against it.