Can you blame them? People act in their selfish self-interest.
It's the same thing with cops and firefighters. Their pensions are calculated based on the earnings of the last few years of employment. So that save vacation days the last few years to inflate their earnings the last few years.
If there is one thing you can count on, it's human greed. And I'm not pretending I'm above it myself.
The problem is that the system is set up to be exploited by the CEOs/etc.
Can you blame them? People act in their selfish self-interest.
Hoo boy, but if a CEO has self-interests that involve steering the company in a socially responsible direction (or maybe just being less extractive), cries of fiduciary duty to shareholders ring out.
I'm really not sure what that is...that some are forced to be that way but secretly want to act ethically? The people who get promoted to this spot tend to fall into the culture of the industry and company, and they've been extensively socially vetted by the people with say beforehand. Companies who tear down rain forests and pollute rivers aren't going to hire someone who wants to change that. This is the reality of how the big corporate world works in America.
Generally stealing cars is clear-cut and easy to prosecute. The opposite is true for insider trading. As a result, things that look an awful lot like insider trading occur all the time without any interest from the SEC.
I'm not very equipped to judge legally what is or is not a crime, but it does seem like there's a lot of leeway for people in control of public companies to effectively take money from their investors.
Yes but it's important that the "crime" of "insider trading" exist so that investors might imagine that executive aren't doing that every single day. Also it's important that the crime is totally discretionary so that prosecutors can punish every single non-executive who somehow gets wind of non-public information while never bothering executives who donate to the right PACs.
It's kind of a fascinating thought experiment, to imagine our society changed in just that one way... lots of cars would have better security, anyway. Also one suspects there would be less demand for public parking, which would probably improve urban life.
Would we? We already know that harsher sentences doesn't necessarily translate into a better deterrent, and we know that when something becomes legal it doesn't mean increased activity.
This might just be a whoosh moment for me, but what's the actual societal damage here? My takeaway from the article was that CEOs try to optimize their personal payouts but there was little that seemed to imply this is a serious problem versus an interesting but already accounted for part of how these companies operate.
It's stealing from investors and employees. Investors in an abstract, probabilistic way and employees in a very concrete, immediate, and dramatic way. "Interesting but already accounted for" doesn't make it right in the same way that an insurance policy covering auto theft doesn't make auto theft right.
It's the same thing with cops and firefighters. Their pensions are calculated based on the earnings of the last few years of employment. So that save vacation days the last few years to inflate their earnings the last few years.
If there is one thing you can count on, it's human greed. And I'm not pretending I'm above it myself.
The problem is that the system is set up to be exploited by the CEOs/etc.