1y ago

Greed has proven to be a more effectively harmful force against humanity than hatred. We should have greed crimes in addition to hate crimes.

Hatred often makes you want to hurt people, but people hurt peope in the name of greed more often, and not only with less potential for guilt, but is often the cause of delusional accolades and reassurance both from within oneself and from others.

Hypothetical:

A CEO lays off 10,000 employees that helped that company succeed, solely to increase earnings and not because the company is hurting, not only seriously hurting 9,997 people, but causing 3 to commit suicide.

A bumpkin gets in a fight with someone he hates the melanin of because he's a moron and kills them.

Who did more damage to humanity that day? They're both, I want to say evil but evil is subjective, they're both highly antisocial, knowingly harmful behaviors, yet one correctly sends you to prison for a long time if not forever, while the other, far more premeditated and quite literally calculated act, is literally rewarded and partied about. Jim Kramer gives you a shout out on tv, good fucking times amirite!

Edit: and this felt relevant to post after someone tried to lecture me about equating layoffs to murder.

"Coca-Cola killed trade unionists in Latin America. General Motors built vehicles known to catch fire. Tobacco companies suppressed cancer research. And Boeing knew that its planes were dangerous. Corporations don't care if they kill people — as long as it's profitable."

https://jacobin.com/2020/01/corporations-profit-values-murder-culture-boeing

163 comments

That's actually a fantastic way to word what I've been thinking about for years. Greed crimes.
I don't know where you're from, but as an American, I'd rally for that to be an amendment.
- I’m gonna start asking for this as much as possible.
  
  Not to blow out your flame, but I doubt you will be able to succeed through a "democratic" system, especially in the US, as politicians need corporate backers to get a seat. Besides, even if you get one independent representative, their voice, so your voice as well, will be snuffed out by several politicians using the hot topic of the day to rally support from masses, while passing bills which benefit their corporate backers.

Unpopular opinion?
Bro if you run on that I'll campaign for you.
- Seconded, greed crimes is a stroke of genius, lets get OP into office.
  
  The term "profiteering" means just that.
- I'm flattered, sincerely.
  That said, if someone as likeable as Bernie couldn't get any traction, my abrasive ass wouldn't help matters.
  
  yeah,
  popular != successful
  especialy "popular amongst lefty computer geeks"

I’d argue greed is a hate crime. A crime against humanity too.

I think this will be a pretty popular opinion here, but in society at large it’s definitely unpopular.

Some historical perspective as it relates to greed:
During some of the United States’ most prosperous times, the marginal income tax rates were higher (topping out around 90%!) and executive compensation was no more than ~20x the average worker pay.
Now, marginal tax rates and capital gains rates are so low, the wealthy often pay the lowest effective rates (sometimes less than 10%). And executive pay is simply off the charts at 300x, 500x, even 700x median pay.
https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-compensation-2018/
The problem is greed and its manifestation as tax and corporate policy. Basic tax reform and implementing new corporate regulations can and would fix many issues plaguing this country.
Those in poverty would be lifted out by higher wages and adequate social safety nets. The growth of a thriving middle class creates a premier labor force, allows people to innovate and start new businesses, and creates additional private support networks that reduces stress on government programs.
It even helps the elite by letting them live in a prosperous country where they don’t have to step over people dying in the streets to go to their entertainment spots. Theft and crimes of desperation decrease as stability increases. Labor is more educated and healthy. They don’t have to drive on roads with defunct bridges. On and on.
We are all in this together. It’s time to act like it. We’ve done it before and we can do it again.

Why not. We already have lust crimes too

they're bothsupposedly "deadly sins"; i'm just not sure if it isn't people other than the sinners who get the death part of the deal.
- "deadly" in this case, means these sins put you at risk o losing eternal life.

Well, agreed, but you can't reform greed out of capitalism.

Greed has often been described as equally evil to hate. As Robert Frost put it:
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

I mean since we're making up arbitrary numbers why doesn't that bumpkin have a handy firearm? Should raise their number to more than 3.

Interesting thought. However greed is part of human nature, since we humans like to get as much resources as possible.
- Hatred is too, yet we recognize that flaw/failing/deficit/defect in ourselves and attempt to minimize it's effects by educating children that it is bad and not socially acceptable and with punishment if practiced to a harmful degree.
  I argue practiced greed should be treated similarly. Greed is a vice and a personal failing. Modern society seems to have complety abandoned this fact. It's part of our darker nature right next to hatred. It's one of the most prominent devils on our shoulders, not angels. We should be teaching kids that harming someone else, even if allowed, if it gives them the opportunity to get more or "succeed" is deeply wrong, and even wanting a lot more than others no less deserving than you is wrong, not "rational self-interest."
  
  Here is the logic issue with your post:
  person lays off 10k employees to help the bottom line
  capital responds positively and investment in the company grows
  company eventually expands to 20k more hires
  goods reach more people
  Every decision the CEO (or whatever officer) made has knockoff effects that make it impossible to prove said person laid people off for their own benefit.
  Your example and proposed moral challenges do not align with reality
  
  True, hatred and greed is embed in human nature. However making laws against greed will likely not solve much but discentivise productivity. Or as libertarians will say "cause atlas to shrug".
- greed is part of human nature
  Bullshit. For a couple hundred thousand years humans kept only what they could carry on their backs. And that only counts homo sapiens sapiens. We only started staying in one place and amassing surplus in the last fifteen thousand years and yet there are people saying "greed is part of human nature."
  It's the greedy who somehow managed to sell us that propaganda. Greed is a mental illness.
  I don't agree with OP. I don't think more punishments are the way to fix things. But neither is gestures broadly the best we can do.
  
  When homo sapians were nomadic, we were quite a tribal social group. The alpha male always had more resources in the group which you can call greed. This was a thing before civilization. And lets be honest, if we had more, would we really share it? Most people want more but when we get more, we do not divide it with others in our community. Very few give up their time and money for charity.
- Copy pasting my own comment:
  FYI this argument (often referred to as the human nature argument) only holds water when you look at European history. Most other societies had an element of communal property. Also in more developed life (including but not limited to humans), especially in situations of crisis, alturism is more expressed than self interest.
  In other words: socialism is not against human nature. Capitalism is.
  
  Tribes may work togeather in a crisis, but there is always a hierarchy. Looking at primates, we alway see a alpha male leader role who is fighting for more resource control in the group.

As much as it is necessary, greed is something very abstract and extremely difficult to prove in courts.
- Not really. If there's a known defect in a product that has the potential to severely impact the quality of a person's life... and the company decides it's cheaper to pay the lawsuits than proceed with a recall... that's greed.
  Any time profit takes precedence over the customers health and well-being... that's fucking greed.

Greed has been made the only power/drive of society. That's why. Capitalism is as bad as sith, it's just a different driver.

not sure if related but a lot of ancient cultures have many rules to hold back envy for a more stable society. they can be very exterme leading to say the recent mask protest in iran but current culture might be the other extreme so to speak.

Greed is a form of hate
- I disagree, that implies that greedy people care about the people they hurt when that isn't the case, and in fact the opposite is true.
  Someone who hates another or others is emotional and passionate about them. They care about how those people are doing, in that they care if they're suffering and want it to be so.
  Capitalists don't tend to operate on the basis of hatred at all, it's worse in my opinion, they operate on the absense of caring about how their actions affect others, which is sociopathy. They either are or work hard to conduct themselves as sociopaths, only concerned with themselves, and only sees others as disposable means to facilitate their material desires, with their only fears being personal repurcussians for their antisocial acts, not the actual harm they inflict.
  A Nazi that hates Jewish people sees the Jewish people's torment or destruction as their desired goal, their endgame.
  A capitalist that kills people through negligence did so to increase profits by cutting safety corners hoping not to get caught, their focus is on getting more money, they likely have no strong emotions whatsoever for the peope they killed, those people's deaths were a "just business" means to the goal of pocketing more money.
  Greed's destructiveness comes out of apathy/indifference of the effect ones greedy actions have on others, the opposite of where hatred's destructiveness comes from, hyperfixation on the suffering of others as the goal.

You're basically arguing that corporations should have some sort of social persona/existance. That means they will have some sort of a degree of responsibility towards people that are involved with the company additional than making profit and the minimum that is required by the law.
Good luck with that point, especially in US ...

As of roughly 24 hours past, I'd say an over 500 more likes to dislikes ratio doesn't, to me at least, count as an unpopular opinion. Especially when it's only around 35 dislikes.
- You like it when you think it is unpopular

Is there a lemmy equivalent to /r/im14andthisisdeep?
- "Hurr durr people don't like greedy corporate goons ruining things for everyone for generations. Stupid teenager thinking they're being d3ep."
  Is that how you mean to come across? Because that's how you come across.
  
  The intent behind OP’s statement is pure, and is shared almost universally.
  But the specific proposal misunderstands so much about why laws are made and how they’re enforced, how power is abused, why hate isn’t illegal, how businesses work, how harm is measured, etc, that the most generous interpretation is that we’re communicating with an inexperienced mind. In this case, apparently hundreds of them.
  On the other hand, no one is born with that experience, and it’s healthy for people (including myself) to keep that in mind.
  
  ruining things for everyone for generations
  He said on the internet lmao
- I think it’s just called “Lemmy.”

What if CEO doesn't fire people, company goes bankrupt, 20,000 ppl lose their jobs, thousands more lose a lot of money on stock market? There's no way to account for everything, not to mention enforcement of this would be biased, so big companies would probably ending up benefitting from that somehow...
- Except the CEO still walks away with millions because they were being paid a ridiculous salary. If they took a pay cut the company would still be standing.

In your hypothetical, things would have been different if the employees received equity compensation with voting shares (in exchange for reduced cash compensation). It's weird how complains about greed only cut one way.

Nah, you'll never get rid of human self interest, whatever you do. That's just how biological life works.
- There's a difference between "self interest" and "how much money can I make through unscrupulous means that will harm untold numbers of people I'll never know".
  I'll do anything to protect my family short of something that will bring harm to another family for no other reason than personal profit. There has to be a line.
- FYI this argument (often referred to as the human nature argument) only holds water when you look at European history. Most other societies had an element of communal property. Also in more developed life (including but not limited to humans), especially in situations of crisis, alturism is more expressed than self interest.
  In other words: socialism is not against human nature. Capitalism is.

So in your hypothetical, the best choice is for the CEO to continue paying 10,000 people for doing work that is apparently no longer necessary, basically as charity?
- Look at it from the other direction: Those 10000 did nothing wrong. And yet some of them lost their livelihoods, some lost lives. The CEO, assuming he is the guy who started the company, and not someone else who came in, could not create the company without them, yet the CEO is the only one who gets rich.
  Again, the company does not need to fire them, they can be routed to other divisions to other workflows, they can take some responsibility from other workers, but they were not, they were fired, simply to enrich someone who already got richer from their work, while giving them a small sliver of the reward.
  
  And if they are valuable contributors they will find new opportunities.
  Again, paying people based on past contributions is not healthy for anyone. Take sports teams for illustration. It would be like a sports team continuing to pay athletes long after their prime and into older ages regardless of value. This means these athletes no longer find new ventures (coaching, scouting, business avenues) and the team sputters taking the whole organization down.

I'm going to ignore the insane part of your point where you equated layoffs with murder.
Greed, like hate, is subjective. It is therefore, like hate, a terrible prerequisite for the activation of the criminal justice system. The idea that motivations for crimes should change the definition and/or penalty of those crimes has fostered popular corruption of the justice system since its inception. Industrialization has accelerated the adoption of human fears into that justice system, to the point where we can no longer even count the number of infractions under the law.
Adding more subjective emotional consideration to a punitive system which is already weighed down beyond the ability to enact swift justice is the opposite of helpful.
- "Coca-Cola killed trade unionists in Latin America. General Motors built vehicles known to catch fire. Tobacco companies suppressed cancer research. And Boeing knew that its planes were dangerous. Corporations don't care if they kill people — as long as it's profitable."
  https://jacobin.com/2020/01/corporations-profit-values-murder-culture-boeing
  You're funny.
  
  If you are talking about the Pinto, then no, that whole case was just misunderstood
  
  What's your point? That people organize themselves to commit crimes? That risky behavior is more dangerous when it's amplified by concentrated capital? None of this justifies the phenomenal leap you made to say that an employer is responsible for the lives of their employees. None of this is precedent for the further corruption of the justice system into subjectivity and emotional bias.
  Can't you see that you're actually making it worse? You go after organizations whose bread and butter is legal entanglement, using legal entanglement as your only weapon. You make the regulatory environment more difficult for startups and SMBs to compete in, and you do nothing but give your (supposed) worst enemies more political tokens with which to negotiate advantageous positions in that environment. Why do you think these corporate elites flush hundreds of millions of dollars sponsoring progressive media outlets? Do you think they're stupid?

163 comments