I think you’d be surprised.

Just because you don’t hear about the payments doesn’t mean they didn’t happen. Many settlement agreements include clauses prohibiting those involved from discussing the case, or even disclosing that a settlement exists.

Ask me how I know, or better yet - don’t.

Agreed. My mom was friends with an ex-secretary of a SF real estate mogul and she's quite wealthy now herself because she sued and was paid off to go away.

The people who are paid off are usually bound by confidentiality agreements.

I think you're conflating absolute and relative 'cost'. The rich might have to pay settlements for their wrongdoing but for a multi billionaire a 1m settlement is more of a hassle for the time it wastes than the money itself. The rich rarely have to pay so much that it genuinely hurts. Any fines levied by the EEOC are likely to be an absolute slap on the wrist.

They still have to go to jail if they're criminals. Our goal shouldn't be to make people genuinely hurt in any situation.

Show me the list of billionaires jailed that aren't in prison because of some more powerful billionaire strongman that they were foolish enough to cross.

They don't always go to jail when they should. They might have a preexisting condition like affluenza that keeps them out.

The goal of fines and punishments should be that they are painful enough to deter the action. It is a strawman to pretend we are discussing "any situation."

Contracts are important for the economy to function. Violating the terms of this many contracts should be painful, like "strip the liability protection of the company structure," painful IMO.

> Our goal shouldn't be to make people genuinely hurt in any situation.

What? No. That’s the whole point of the fine. If it’s just another random expense then it’s not an effective deterrent.

If the rich guy goes to jail for two weeks because he fucked over some poor people it’s not an effective deterrent.

If the poor guy goes to jail for 20 years because he ripped off some rich people it’s just a step shy of a private police force.

> What? No. That’s the whole point of the fine. If it’s just another random expense then it’s not an effective deterrent.

Why not? The damage is compensated in absolute terms, the price is paid.

Only if you want to normalize the behavior. Giving specific behavior a fixed monetary cost means rich people aren’t bound by the law.

All fines give behaviour a fixed monetary value. Does that mean no-one is bound by law?

You missed the point. Given monetary value does not mean no-one is bound by the law. It's if the monetary value is so low that it doesn't matter for the particular individual that suddenly, the individual is not bound by law anymore.

Is it really that hard to understand?

It's easy to understand; just not easy to agree with. The law's job is to enforce penalties and rights equally, blindly even, and not to scale everything according to someone's individual circumstance.

Well your previous message suggested that it was not understood. Apparently it is, and you just disagree.

Then we seem to differ on our view of "equal rights". To me, the law defines what should not be done ("is illegal"), and how one prevents people from doing it. Now if the law defines a fine that is high enough to prevent me from doing something illegal, but seen by a super-rich like I would see 1 cent, then we are not equal: the super-rich is effectively allowed to do it (as in, "nothing prevents him from doing it, because from his point of view he doesn't have to pay anything"), and I am not (because I can't afford it).

It's not the law's function to adjust the punishment to subjective view of the punished. Otherwise, you could argue that heterosexual people deserve lighter prison sentences than bi- or homosexual, because sex 2ith the same sex is much easier to obtain in prisons and therefore prison time is harsher on heterosexuals. For the record, I think this example is absurd, and I'm just using it to highlight the kind of absurdity your logic leads to.

You take an absurd example, then arbitrarily decide that my logic leads to your absurd example, and therefore conclude that my logic is absurd? That's interesting :-).

In case you care at all: I don't think my logic leads to your absurd example.

There's a reason why fines scale with income in some places. If you were charged $5 every time you got caught speeding, I bet you'd be much more likely to speed. The fine has to serve as punishment, not just restitution.

>They still have to go to jail if they're criminals.

Genuine question: do they?

>Rich people usually don't have to pay, that's how it works.

The reason why Musk is the current owner of Twitter (or X) is because he had to pay, even though he really didn't want to.

I mean, he had to pay, but he still managed to somehow get twitter to pay 50% for itself…

They pay, but it doesn’t matter that much when you are so wealthy.

Exactly.

There is no will to make oligarchs like Musk pay in amounts that meaningfully impact their lives, and as a result they can embark upon virtually limitless folly and malfeasance.

It's really hard to weasel out of employment law violations, even for the rich.

Isn't wage theft like $30 billion/year or something ridiculous like that? Regardless of what ends up happening with this one I think most of them are getting away with it.

Some additional research here: https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-2021/

Yes — significantly more than blue collar crimes like burglaries and shoplifting. And it’s not just “the system” that is invested in letting rich people get off the hook; just look at how many people on here are extremely vocal about e.g. arresting their way out of petty theft yet have no interest in the far more harmful crimes committed by rich people.

Blue collar crimes like burglaries? There is a wiki-entry of "Blue collar crimes", but the phrase doesn't make sense. It is not a crime you do becouse you are a blue collar worker, unlike say finanial fraud as a bank clerk.

> Isn't wage theft like $30 billion/year or something ridiculous like that?

It's hard to justify this. It's multiplied-up survey data. It's not real the way FTX numbers were actual real numbers worth talking about.

"Multiplied-up survey data" seems like a pretty normal way to do estimations in statistics. What is your concrete issue with this?

Surveys aren't a general thing about statistics.

I assumed you were derogatorily referencing study data. Can you be specific what kind of survey it was that you saw, and why it doesn't rise to the status of a study?

Elon Musk could foot the estimated yearly wage theft for the entire United States for 4 years and still have 50B.

In this case I don't think he cares. He can just walk away from $44 billion without noticing.

I think it's more the blow to his ego.