We tried it your way many times, and it failed in every case (civil war reconstruction, Treaty of Versailles, Iraq provisional authority, response to the great depression, etc).

When we do the other thing and focus on protecting the innocent instead of punishing the guilty, things have worked out far better (Marshall Plan, Covid response, this).

This isn't war, this is corruption.

The context is wildly different. For one, war is chosen by a countries aristocracy while the lower classes have little agency in the matter. It is not the lower classes of these countries that are guilty, but the upper class, and therefore plans to help the lower class victims despite their complicity are pragmatic and sound. It is not pragmatic to punish slaves that attacked you, you would seek to arm them so they are not enslaved...

Punishment must be proportional to a person's power.

The COVID response against China is still pending, both of our countries are gearing up for war. Rhetoric around Taiwan has increased, and there is active work to reduce dependency on China.

The Marshall plan had nuremburg trials.

There's a bit of irony in mentioning the COVID response, considering the knock-on effects of that are partially/largely to blame here.

If we ignore the fact that there may very well be some who are 'guilty' in the COVID saga, that certainly didn't have the same story as a bank that made poor bets, and the (relatively) wealthy depositors of said bank that made poor risk calculations and got burned by the black swan.

Have you considered the covid response openly violated the Constitution's 5th Ammendment? The gov shut down businesses for the public good (took private property) without just compensation. And what marginal compensation was offered was done so through PPP and was corruptly incentivized.

I would describe the covid response as anything but working out well.

I'm talking specifically about fiscal and monetary response, and whether or not we punished people, addressing the comment I was replying to.

For example it was good that we gave out PPP loans fairly literally even though it causes major fraud. If we had moved slower and endured that bad actors couldn't get away with abuse, the response would have been worse.

> For example it was good that we gave out PPP loans fairly literally even though it causes major fraud.

My point was addressing the incentive scheme for PPP: banks got paid a percentage of the origination amount so processed the largest loans first, and by the time they got to the smaller applications, they ran out of money. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbfreeman/2020/04/23/ppp-la...

The 5th Ammendment doesn't say the government can provide just compensation to some people. It says they must provide just compensation to all that their seizure of private property directly impacts.

Fraud is of course another issue, but my main concern is the corrupt incentive structure and glaring 5A violation.

> Point is that a system of such asymmetries rewards so many at public cost - and that includes the other stakeholders who are today “wiped out” (but still get to keep their gains from the good years). /end

Yep, and that is exactly the point. They must not get to keep their gains and they must lose an additional amount proportional to their chance of success.

The expected value of corruption must be negative.