Quote from: rainingbitcoins on July 22, 2011, 05:57:49 AM

Quote from: Rassah

See above for resources. Also, customers vote with their dollars. If you're an ass and are legally untrustworthy, those involved with you from a business sense, those being both the end-customers buying your products products and your suppliers selling you materials, will both start to dump you.

Oh yes, this always works. Except how are people even going to know what evil shit these companies are up to when a different division of the same company owns the newspapers and never prints anything bad about them? You don't even need your little AnCapistan to see the results of this right now. Coca-cola has outright murdered union organizers in Latin America and their products still fly off the shelves. Hershey's and other chocolate companies use cocoa grown by modern-day slaves on the Ivory Coast, and most people don't even learn about that, let alone have a chance to get angry about it. With the kind of corporate consolidation we see these days, you also run into the problem of trying to boycott companies that make thousands of products of every different description, and you know most people aren't going to bother with that.

This I very much agree with. Capitalism encourages externalizing costs as much as possible and obscuring those costs. (Now yes, I realize government generally increases this, rather than decreases). And it very much incentivizes anti-social behavior (in terms of putting it out of your mind the conditions the product you are about to buy were made under - which is easy in a large and faceless and highly complex market where maybe even the ingredients for your sandwich came from 20 different countries)

Now the one good argument that I've heard from AnCaps about this is that eliminating limited liability will take care of a lot of this. But then they don't explain how that doesn't keep the market from losing a lot of its dynamism. If I have to be worried that the shares I own in chemical company Y are going to make me criminally liable for an accident, I'm going to be a hell of a lot less likely to invest my money in companies that I don't know a ton about and aren't engaging in any risky practices.

But, it would certainly make it more interesting for CEOs if they could spend the rest of their life in a cage, be shunned from a community, stripped of all their wwealth, or shot in the head (or whatever forms of restitution are used in the jurisdiction they are operating in) for, say, spilling a bunch of toxic sludge in a town and causing a bunch of kids to die.

[of course, this does not deal with the short term gains/long term problems whereby actions can be taken and hands can be washed long before negative effects come to light]