little things that annoy me: articles about how a group of people should be put in jail that don’t actually name any specific people or any specific crimes committed by any of them
like. you can’t actually send someone to jail just because they are an asshole and you don’t like them. not even if they contributed to the devastation of the global economy.
(note: I know this is an unpublished draft and that you may no longer endorse it; I am trying to discourse with the post and with the linked article, not with present!you)
Charitably, I think they are saying that contributing to the devastation of the global economy should have been/should be made illegal. If it becomes illegal now, that might prevent people from doing it again, or at least from doing it the time after next once it’s been proved that that law has teeth. The really difficult things would be 1) getting the law to have teeth, and 2) proving mens rea, since the bankers in question would try to claim they had no idea what they were doing was dangerous.
Hmm, I think I disagree even with your charitable version. I don’t really remember what happened in the financial crisis that well but I can’t think of anyone involved who makes me go “yes what that person did should be illegal and result in going to prison for a long period of time.” I think people’s first instinct is to react to these things with “a bunch of bad stuff happened, we should make all of it illegal so it can’t happen again” when like, the problem is really a complicated mess of slightly misaligned incentives and human error rather than evil people doing clearly bad things.
And when it comes to financial regulation, I don’t even think you can assume the charitable version, because the way a lot of financial regulation actually works is “bank does something bad, we decide after the fact that it’s bad and should probably be illegal, we fine them for something or another.” Which does get around the problem that writing good financial regulation is really hard. But I’m still not a fan.
(and thanks! I totally expected people to completely ignore my #unpublished drafts tag and am pleased to see that people are reading them somewhat differently from my normal posts)