So you're saying as long as someone else did something illegal I am free to rip him off whenever I want to? Wtf?

Pretty clearly saying that if it was the other way around, an insurance company defrauding customers for the same amount, nobody would be going to jail.

Yeah. Isn't this almost literally what Goldman did during the financial crisis. Seems like what is counts as a financial crime or fraud has a lot to do with how much purchase you have with your respective countries powerful and wealthy.

In what sense did Goldman Sachs do something similar during the crisis?

Trading derivatives which are essentially a form of insurance on assets they had plenty of inside dope to know where rotten.

That still doesn't make it morally or legally right. An inequity? Yes. Relevant to this discussion?

Every conversation on here about a legal case is: people who aren't lawyers (definitely not lawyers in China) doing a "what's legal" take, versus people doing a "legal realist" take, versus people doing a "what I think should be legal" take. Some mishmash in between.

All three of these takes are pretty basic in their extreme ("we shall see (in court)," "capitalism," and "as long as the law absolves specifically me and people I like." Let's just play it out:

- Did she break some laws? Probably, and whoever broke the law most clearly will lose in court. We'll see what the judge says. Not sure if judges in China are impartial.

- But if she went to court, the insurance company is pretty rich so it will win. Also this is China. As a matter of who should win...

- I will never be an insurance company, even if I sometimes would like cheaper insurance I will never be on the wrong side of justice here, they're a bunch of scoundrels. What about all the ways they rob me?

Here you go, that's every legal perspective you're going to hear, from a commenter or journalist or whatever. Obviously what we want to know is HOW she did it.

This is succinct and insightful. Thanks.

The article doesn't have much detail about what she actually did, so it's not clear to me whether what she was doing was wrong.

If a hedge fund profits from predicting a corporate merger by tracking corporate jet flights, many people would say that's just them doing their research and being well informed. It's just obscure information, not insider information.

If this woman were trading flight insurance in the type of investment market that trades sophisticated insurance products like credit default swaps, her actions would be completely fair.

That she was doing it with retail products is less ideal, but not enough to clearly condemn her.

The GP is saying that you shouldn't assume that insurance companies are playing the game of civil society (wherein everyone is expected to be ethical to one-another), when in fact they are playing the game of profit-maximizing (wherein everyone is expected to rip each-other off to the fullest extent of the letter of the law.)

See also: the tax code. An accountant is just someone who rips off the government for you, to stop the government ripping you off so much. Because that's the game that's being played, as agreed by all players.

I didn't read it as such. I read it as saying that appealing to holding up a social contract isn't much of an argument when the other side of the transaction doesn't uphold that same contract

I usually don't lose sleep at night when I see thieves stealing property from other thieves who also steal property. It's even more difficult to care when a massive thief is stolen from.

I've interacted enough with privatized insurance companies that if insurance wasn't a requirement or near requirement, I'd happily choose other options of mitigating risk. I much prefer self-insuring when feasible.

If it's a big corporation that's systematically the beneficiary of a legal double standard? Yeah, I think I'm okay with that.

Replace illegal with "less moral" in terms of your own personal morality, and yes, many philosophers would say that.

No, two wrongs don't make a right. I was just arguing against the idea that using the service for something other than it's intended purposes, or violating a social contract as the parent said, is the particular reason they'd come after her. It's because she messed with their money.

I am pretty shocked by other responses. It is definition of "rule of law" that we do not rip off each other because we feel wrong but instead are governed (ruled) by law.

In a democratic country the law is supposed to be made by democratic process.

If you feel wronged, pillaging shops is not the way to solve it. The way to solve it is to get informed about what democracy is and cast your votes to get represented by people who will defend and strengthen democratic process.

Instead, what happens is people do not put enough or any due dilligence when casting their vote and the country gets represented by people who don't care about democratic process and only care about their partisan interests.

Get some good laws to make sure the best way to be profitable is to do good to your customers. Let's not be naive that trying to rip off the insurance company is an attempt to alleviate any of current problems (except for personal budget problems).

That's not the definition of "rule of law" or it would be punishable to break the spirit of the law instead of the "letter" of the law.

This is a lot like the difference between tax evasion (breaking letter of the law) and tax avoidance (breaking the spirit of the law).

It's also arguable that hedge funds exist to arbitrage the difference between the spirit of contractual arrangements (thou shalt not use pension funds to take out massive loans) and the letter of contractual arrangements (god only knows what you can and can't do with the company pension fund, but you can probably bribe the prosecutor to agree with you).

So, it's normal business practice for businesses and the wealthy to rip others off. The difference between them and us is they have better lawyers and are able to bribe prosecutors who have a different interpretation of the letter of the law.

Better laws are not going to level this playing field because the problem is largely how we practice law and all major parties support the status quo.

The definition of "rule of law" is contrast to rule by a person (typically a dictator, king, etc.). "Rule of law" means that instead of a person or a group of people giving arbitrary directions, we observe body of law as answer to what is and what is not allowed.

The reason this line of thinking isn't very compelling to many people is because it isn't very actionable. There are clear "positive" outcomes to "ripping someone off"...the outcome of voting is far removed, negligible, and possibly even has no effect at all (depending on where you live and what social group you're in).

So while I agree with you in principle, this approach is insufficient.

> If you feel wronged, pillaging shops is not the way to solve it.

Sometimes, it is. For groups of people with little to no political power, protesting, rioting, and causing a bunch of social upheaval is definitely a productive way to force other people to consider and address their grievances. There are a lot of negative tradeoffs, of course, but there's no denying that it's an effective way to raise awareness.

Otherwise, we wouldn't even be having this discussion.

There comes a point where you feel your democratic process has been thoroughly captured, and you find it hard to drum up much sympathy for the orgs that did the capturing.

Capitalism does tend towards that...