1. Those customers who were stolen from will get to participate in the mother of all class-action lawsuits. The settlement will be outlandish. Juries hate huge corporations that screw the little guy, and the lawyers on both sides know it.
If you don't trust the class action to provide you with an equitable settlement, you can opt out and sue them individually. No doubt many lawyers are already lining up for the easy money here.
I've never known a libertarian who opposes the existence of a legal system.
2. So far, no one has produced evidence that the CEO knew about this or allowed it to happen. Putting him in prison would therefore be unjust. The article claimed that his sales quotas were excessive, but the only source for that is the same employees who knowingly defrauded their employer. Relying on their honesty seems like a bad idea.
What we know for sure is that he had sales targets for his salesmen, which is not unethical or unusual. We also know that the vast majority of Wells Fargo salesmen did not resort to fraud to hit those targets.
Even if the sales targets were high, the employees should either step up to the challenge, request a transfer out of sales, or resign. There are no excuses for defrauding your employer, and claiming "my job was too hard, so I lied!" is cause for termination.
Nope, since they have a mandatory binding arbitration clause. See http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/24/business/wells-fargo-asks-....
"mandatory binding arbitration clause"
(Binding contracts require competent parties on both sides).
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/business/dealbook/arbitrat...
You either aren't familiar with what the colloquialism "easy money" means or you are really underestimating the difficultly of going to court against a bank.
Either the CEO did know, or he should have known. The bank's internal audit teams must have known (they would have reviewed staff activities as they always do for fraud, and the idea that they had missed this for many years isn't tenable)
So either the internal audit teams were instructed not to report these issues, or senior management ignored their reports.
He signed his name to the financial reports.
http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-on-the-difference-...
"Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering," says Jobs
It's one thing to have one or two departments with illegal incentives. When the entire company is run using illegal incentives, the CEO has to know. Or, he should have known.
Quite frankly, the entire executive should be fired for cause, and sued by everyone.
In this case, the bank charged customers for services they never requested. That is fraud. It has nothing to do with "free markets" as defined by libertarians.
If you find some libertarian scholarship, you will also notice that libertarians see contract enforcement as a vital role of government. This would also be a breach of contract.
Libertarian != Anarchist :)
This "faith in the law" is libertarianism's biggest weakness, and the reason why the older I've gotten, the more appealing anarchism has become. The ways we see the law working in this case, are just the ways that law actually works. Screw the little guy and protect the big man? A feature, not a bug!
The reasonable way to oppose unfairness is to actually oppose unfairness, not to imagine that some contingent and evolved phenomenon called "law" is going to magically give us what we want. If utopia comes and police are devoted only to the enforcement of contract, those entrusted with interpreting contracts will be our rulers. Those in power, will exercise power. This recursion can't be defined out of existence.
But the original comment I responded to seemed to imply that the libertarian theory would allow this "free market" behavior, which is not the way libertarians see it.
That wasn't the case in this situation. Customers didn't have all of the information, and as a result, were taken advantage of.
In regards to the specific fraud component (signing up customers to services they didn't ask for), I think you've just seen the consequences of what happens. Share price tanks, CEO is forced to leave. Again, this comes down to access to information; when it became clear Wells Fargo were committing fraud, the market moved against it due to a reduction in good will/image/reputation. As a result of this information becoming public, fewer customers are likely to sign up to Wells Fargo, meaning the expected profits from this company are likely to be lower than expected previously.
The government has a role to keep information available, so society can make a decision about what it deems acceptable corporate practice.
"Economics has been subject to criticism that it relies on unrealistic, unverifiable, or highly simplified assumptions, in some cases because these assumptions simplify the proofs of desired conclusions. Examples of such assumptions include perfect information, profit maximization and rational choices."
Free markets are for efficiency, laws are safety.
On the other hand, a lack of enforcement against fraud and deception can also ruin a market. For a good example of this, American consumers do not have to check for counterfeit rice, while Chinese consumers do.
I don't think that adequately handles situations where the CEO creates an environment where the emergent behavior of low level employees is to create fake accounts, but it would possibly address the liability of the financial of the victims.
Edit: The business considers this complex, multi-variable equation and tries to extract as much profit as possible. In many cases, the consumer is apathetic. Personally, I signed up for a Wells Fargo account last week despite being completely aware of this news. As a joke, I almost asked the guy if I _already_ had an account!
If you want to be angry, look at how the government is failing you now. If you want to say that the "non-free market" you're living in is better, well, what happened here? The CEO just gets to retire and they have to pay a measly fine.
Oh and before anybody says "we don't live in a true free market", until we live under absolutely no system of government, nobody civilization has really ever lived under what is technically a free market. If you pay taxes or tribute or respect some sort of authority you live in a government and it is acting upon the market. I find that to be a useless definition.
Just look at the ridiculous situation with patents, trademarks and copyrights. All of them have long outgrown their original intention and has been so amplified and extended that they can be used to very effectively kill all smaller competition and milk consumers dry.
The argument that government is horrible has been used effectively again and again to make government horrible. Is has been stripped of cash to work effectively and become completely dependent on largess from the private enterprise to function. That attracts the most rotten people as politicians, thus ensuring that government never looks good. The last thing these people want is a well functioning government.
What I wanted to stop was this demonization of "the free market" and its wholesale "what would libertarians say nonsense" because it ignorantly ignores the nuances of the political philosophy and unfairly demonizes an economic system that is responsible for a lot of good things.
The issue with patents, well, that's an example of the government failing. Not the market.
> nobody (in) civilization has really ever lived under what is technically a free market.
So, we do or we don't?
Most, if not all Western countries are not free markets. They are often partially free, but definitely not completely free. And there are very few countries in the world right now, if any, which have a free market.
So no, he doesn't live in a free market.
The consumer is left to either (a) pay the "idiot" tax of being stupid enough to sign up for a thieving bank, or (b) rely on the government to protect his best interests.
While I have severe misgivings about the efficiency and corruption of large government, I find it hard to argue that a perfect "free market" would be better for the consumer.