[cookiecaper]

>The firm said it will pay a civil monetary penalty of $2.385 billion, a cash payment of $875 million and $1.8 billion in consumer relief

Where is that $3.26 billion of cash going? I know you're going to say the SEC, the DOJ, or some other [combinations of] government entity. I get that. But then where does it go? It seems that people often forget that when this happens, there's still a human that sees a $3.26 billion uptick in the amount of money he controls (though it's possibly divided between branches/depts).

What does that guy do with it? Build a (few dozen) new office building(s)? Hire 10k more employees for the agency that employs him (only 50 of which are his family and friends collecting 250% of their market rate)? Does he keep it in a bank account and collect interest on it? Send it into a black hole somewhere in the Treasury so that it can help pay off "the national debt"? Spend it on contractors? Bonuses for himself and the other people who helped "take the bad guys down"? Motorboats? Yachts?

People act like it's just an inherent truth that fined money is better off on a bureaucrat's desk than a banker's. Is that really real life?

[deciplex]

Do you have a better idea? It sounds like you're trying to make a "taxes are theft" argument against fines for committing theft which is pretty hard to take seriously.

[cookiecaper]

>Do you have a better idea?

I think almost any idea is a better idea than that.

>It sounds like you're trying to make a "taxes are theft" argument against fines for committing theft which is pretty hard to take seriously.

I'm not making an argument that taxes are theft. I'm really just trying to illustrate that while there may not be an institutional profit motive for governmental bureaus, there is a personal and/or professional profit motive for whoever gets to spend that money. A lot of young people seem to think that it's always better to have the government providing a service because "they care about more than just profit" or something similar.

Moving the money between a third-party contractor that provides a service bought by the government into the actual government itself doesn't necessarily mean anything good is going to happen. You don't have to look very far, either into the past or into the map, to see that; in many countries, the absolute richest people are politicians and bureaucrats.

It's a lot easier to fire a contractor that does a bad job than it is to replace a government bureau that does a bad job. I think it's important to convey that bureaucrats can and sometimes do still get a large amount of money, and that can affect their motives and decisions just as easily as it can for anyone else. These positions deserve scrutiny and oversight too. The people running the private sector are not that different from the people running public services.

[deciplex]

> I think almost any idea is a better idea than that.

Okay I'll take that as a "no", then.

Again, this is a fine, not even a tax. Whatever ethical considerations are bothering you about levying fines for corporate criminal behavior are not going to be addressed by handing over the fines to some third party instead, or whatever you're going on about.

Frankly, they could take the money collected from the fine and launch it into a heliocentric orbit, for all I care, because the primary aim of levying the fine in the first place i.e. as a punishment for criminal behavior is still achieved.

[edelans]

IMHO a reasonable use of this money should be to be spent to fix the problems that lead to this crisis.