For example: private equity firms buying trailer parks and raising rents so high that people go bankrupt
The moment you become a billionaire you’re given a choice. Either you forfeit 70% of your current value to a fund that provides free school lunches, universal healthcare, and maybe UBI. If you refuse to donate 70% then you go to real, no shit, butt raping prison for 10 years where upon your release (if you survive) you will start over from square one with no money, no bank account, no car, no house, nothing but the clothes you wore to prison.
Corporations and businesses now have jail time.
The leading body of the business are each individually arrested for the duration of a full financial audit of their activities to insure that they’ve followed the law and acted in good faith.
The business itself will be lead by an established committee of financial ethics officers until the sentence is fulfilled.
All net profits, dividends, and financial winfalls of the company are forfeited to the federal government for the duration of the sentence.
After the jail time is served, 80% of all aforementioned incomes are garnished to repay victims for damages.
Any other criminal activities found during audits and operations are to be prosecuted individually.
Line by line:
This would basically kill all financial activity, even mom and pops who are, ya know, incorporated.
Guilty until proven innocent? We going there?
This part will never get corrupted. 🙄 It’s still workable and better than nothing!
Oh I like this part. Not seeing any downsides.
Victims generally are compensated. The main issue here is state and federal laws limiting damages using outdated thinking and/or static dollar amounts.
Again, we already do this, but it seems too many slide anyway.
Illegal to privately own any combination of assets worth more than $10 million.
So your plan is to destroy anything of worth? My awesome eye doc has 4 offices, no doubt his practice is worth more than $10M, to jail he goes and fuck all his employees. Also, you’re going to destroy a huge number of family farms. An individual might score a storefront or three in the worst parts of Manhattan for less than $10M, but fuck 'em if the value goes up. And so on.
If you think $10M is a lot of money, you shouldn’t be talking economic law.
Destroy? No – it just needs to be owned more collectively.
Your awesome eye doc can give employees part ownership in the business to reduce his total personal assets below $10M.
Also, you’re going to destroy a huge number of family farms.
No single person is operating a $10M farm all by himself with no family and no employees. If it really is a ‘family farm’ – unlikely at that price – then its assets can be divided up between the family members so that no individual person owns more than $10M. Or better yet, you could again give part ownership to the laborers actually working on the farm.
An individual might score a storefront or three in the worst parts of Manhattan for less than $10M, but fuck 'em if the value goes up.
So Manhattan storefronts won’t be easy to individually own. You’ll need to figure out some sort of group or collective ownership.
If you think $10M is a lot of money, you shouldn’t be talking economic law.
It is a lot of money for one single person.
The whole idea here is to spread the wealth. To tackle wealth inequality – quite possibly the worst economic problem today, and still growing fast.
We’re all agreed that the wealth gap is of paramount importance, but $10M just ain’t that much for an individual business owner. For example, they may have to dip into personal finances to bail their company out at some point or react to a new competitor.
Where we kinda disagree is on collective ownership. In my eye doctor example, what if one office was losing money hand over fist and needed closed? Think the employees would vote themselves and their fellows out of a job?
A great example of this kinda idea is QuikTrip. Employees don’t have part ownership, they get monster monthly bonuses depending on store profits, often more than their regular paycheck. You get a promotion by moving to a better performing store, or the holy grail, an interstate truck stop. These people work at a gas station and you’ll see 10, 20, 40 year pins on their shirts. Benefits are, or course, excellent. I contracted doing Y2K upgrades in '98 and was stunned at how well those places operate. 6-weeks of training before you’re allowed behind the register kinda operation. I’m down for that!
There’s another company that’s similar, but the name escapes me. It’s stunning and frustrating that these assholes can’t look at a corporation like QT and say, “They’re expanding and making money hand over fist! We could do that!”
For example, they may have to dip into personal finances to bail their company out at some point
Just take out a loan instead. Best part is that won’t even count toward the wealth cap, since the loan money is offset by the negative balance owed on the loan.
This law would 100% only be used against people organizing boycotts and informing people about factory farming.
If you at any time hold assets more than, let’s say $250 million, all of your property is seized and you get a iridescent credit card that says “I won capitalism”. You can use it for $5k a day (growth linked to minimum wage) to do anything, and we’d offer a concierge service to rent mansions or yachts through a point system
My department would then be concerned with handling their investments to fund the program and reinvest what’s left over in the form of grants (mostly to start and run small businesses with no repayment if certain metrics are met)
But mostly we’d be game masters. We’d keep the capitalism winners busy competing for prestigious (but meaningless) prizes. They want to fly people in for a party? You can pay their way with points to flex. You want to shake hands with the president? We’ll run a point auction occasionally and have award ceremonies for the special winners
Otherwise, they can use the money however they want. They can play the games and compete with their “peers”, or they could fuck off and live like a big shot…5k a day is a lot of money. And we’re happy for them to use it, they can buy things and donate their remainder to anyone they want. They could let their entire family live in comfort and safety
But if they ever touch money, literally or figuratively, or fail to register into the system, they lose their freedom and are forced into our little summer camp games for a length of time determined by the offense
Silly as it sounds, we’d be literally saving the world
$5K a day wouldn’t put in dent in a wealthy person’s payroll. So, we just gonna fire all their workers?
BTW, Take 40-50% out of that $5K for worker’s comp, liability insurance, taxes, unemployment insurance, and on and on and on.
Most of the overly complicated plans can be realized with “tax the snot out of them and fix the tax code”.
At $35k a week, you could have a dozen employees, easy. Rich people don’t usually tend to pay nearly as well as one would think
Plus, the company that is a billionaire is getting possessed by our department, it’s part of their wealth, and the jobs go with it… Security can run security, housekeeping and maintenance will work the properties, even cooks and nutritionists can float between our special guy/gal properties the way they do now, just following a schedule instead of their billionaire. Their finance people can apply to join the department, although they’d probably not be a good “culture fit”
They’re free to hire a few people as bodyguards or an entourage if they want. It’s their stipend
The whole idea here is to distract these people so they don’t destroy the world. Taxing the shit out of them is all well and good, but they’re always going to try to exploit the rules and lobby politicians. It’ll be an endless flight - we ended up here in a century, we’ll end up here again
Instead, we turn it into a prestigious thing and give them new games to play, new ways to flex on each other that doesn’t use the rest of us as a game board.
If some servants of billionaires end up out of a job? Sorry, enjoy having a working social safety net while you job hunt. Enjoy a flourishing job market now that the velocity of money is no longer hampered by dragon hoards
Or hell, with the insane assets billionaires have, we could pay their wages for life and barely touch the bottom line
wage gap, no income over a certain ratio between least and most income per company
and since we already have a minimum wage, establish a maximum wage
Start with the main perpetrators of course and criminalize underpaying
Some areas to fix would be usury above certain interest rates (payday loans, mostly) and “health insurance” with high denial rates and soaring deductibles.
Instead of going for a hail marry, why not do simple things that we know will work. Ban the industries that prey on the poor: gambling, pay-day/ car-title lending, rent to own anything, settlement-restructuring, and the practice of charging inmates rent. I’m sure there are plenty I forgot.
If you really wanted revolutionary policy, do something about compounding interest.
hoarding / stealing wealth
If the only tool available is criminalization, that’s not enough. Financial violence preys on the lack of a guarantee of needs being met, so the best option would be to make some way to guarantee that. But some options are:
Make a “business license” system. If at any point a business commits any financial crime, like monopolization, price gouging, financial violence, etc, all the upper leadership is immediately sacked, and they are barred from running any other business, with serious prison time as punishment for dodging this ban.
Be brutal on monopolies and anticompetitive practice. If a company we’ve gets more than 70% of the revenue of their sector in a year, some of the company is sold off at auction. If it’s shown that the company was using anticompetitive practices, the leadership is immediately sacked, loses any business license, and gets prison time.
Any company that provides a needed good or service (eg. food, housing, energy, internet, transport) has a profit cap. All their accounting must be publicly available, and if the profit or any leader’s income is too high (number to be decided), this counts as a financial crime.
It doesn’t matter. The only reason the state has power is that capital grants it, the only reason capital has value is that the state protects it. The state and capital are interdependent and you can’t use one to fight the other.
so you’re advocating for a violent overthrow of both state and capital by the citizens?
Yes, the state and capital do endless violence upon the poor and underprivileged and it will take some degree of violence to shift from taking that to defending ourselves from it.
Having an MBA = Attempted fraud.
I’m not opposed to having people who know how to run a business, but they should criminalize certain ways of running it. Any business practices that take advantage of workers or tax loopholes should be banned from teaching in business schools.
Wage theft, as in any participant goes to jail, not just a fine and restitution from the company.
Love it. Employee steals from the company and goes to jail. Company steals from employee and just has to pay a fine. Always seemed like bullshit to me.
Enforcement of your law would eliminate most of the crime. And really change the demographics of prison populations.
Restitution should also be inversely proportional to the annual wages of the victims. The closer to the poverty line they are the higher the multiplier.
Where can I vote for you?
We already have laws. One call the the state labor board and that employer is fucked. No one knows this so no one does it.
Lots of cases don’t end up with jail time. Just a slap on the wrist in the form of fines and restitution
Wage theft generally doesn’t come with jail time for individual cases, but employees should know their rights. I worked IT for a payroll company and we were serious as a heart attack on the subject.
For example, if I call the board and say my employer made me work 300 hours of unpaid overtime last year, I get that money if the employer can’t show signed timecards for every instance of my claim. This is automatic, does not require legal representation, guilty until proven innocent. And then your payroll company spikes your rate and worker’s comp insurance may even get involved. (WC insurance rates look at more than injuries. If they sense you’re a scummy employer, lots of turnover for example, up go your rates.)
So yeah, the punishment should be jail for egregious cases, but we already have laws people don’t know about or take advantage of.
And then you get fired.
If get fired directly after contacting the labor board, you have the oh-so-rare, slam dunk, wrongful termination suit. If the employer is that dumb, eat their fucking lunch. (Of our few dumbshit payroll clients, I can only think of one that would try that.)
OR, simply cower, accept whatever they do to you, and come to lemmy to scream about cAPitAlISm.
It’s hard to prove wrongful termination when the employer can terminate for almost any reason or none at all.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, just that it’s really easy for businesses to get away with exploiting labor, and it’s comparatively hard for individuals to do anything about it.
Squirrel prostitution .
The fuck am I sposed to do with all these squirlyfans accounts?
noooo
