[capybaraStorm]

While I have trouble wrestling with the assertion as well, it does hold pretty true to the way the US justice system works. Sentencing is generally far harsher for financial crimes as $ goes up.

In stuff like drug crimes, US even has the death penalty as sanctioned remedy for quantities and enterprises of sufficient organization for mega profits. The thought process seems to be if you provide bad health care in the form of selling illegal drugs, at some level the death penalty is on the table.

[gruez]

>While I have trouble wrestling with the assertion as well, it does hold pretty true to the way the US justice system works. Sentencing is generally far harsher for financial crimes as $ goes up.

Right, but only for financial crimes. You're not going to get off murder by saying you only got $100 for the hit.

[capybaraStorm]

If you sell a few hits of fentanyl you aren't going to meet the statutory definition of a criminal enterprise and therefore will not be eligible for federal death penalty even though fentanyl induces death.

If you sell $100M of fentanyl you can get the death sentence, since fentanyl is an element in inducing death at basically any sufficiently large quantity of a criminal enterprise.

It is not exactly the same, but it has a lot of parallels to the argument I see here. If you are an insurance salesman selling contracts you know will not be honored and such denied claims will be an element of death, many will not see it as serious as being the criminal enterprise leader who orchestrated it. Even in such case that the policy can be attributed to a single salesman, the executive is likely to be held more culpable just as the US code holds the criminal enterprise executive to the death penalty whereas it may not hold the low level guy who sold the fentanyl.

[s1artibartfast]

Drug dealing isnt a financial crime

[capybaraStorm]

The government has had a very hard time classifying what type of crime drug dealing is. First they said it was a tax crime (well before that, an import or tariff crime). Then the 10th amendment was basically gutted, and it became a crime where all the facts could be identical to a pharmacy dispensing a script, but sans paying for a DEA license.

It is definitely a very strange one. The classical liberalism argument is that the most prominent aspect remains essentially a financial crime of failure to pay the licensing tax.

[gruez]

>and it became a crime where all the facts could be identical to a pharmacy dispensing a script, but sans paying for a DEA license.

That describes a bunch of crimes? If you raid a drug dealer's house and kill a bunch of people in the process, you'll go to jail. If it's the police doing it with a "license" (ie. a warrant), it's suddenly fine. More banal is you driving along, following all applicable laws and causing no issues, but if you're doing it without a license or insurance, it's suddenly illegal.

[capybaraStorm]

Yes of course. All of this seems to me totally psychotic and not at all a dystopia I want to live in. Which is why I lived in an area with almost no government, very weak police services, little to no code/zone enforcement, weak environmental controls, etc etc.

I pointed it out largely because I find the drug laws to be particularly strange.

[s1artibartfast]

for financial crimes, the loss of money IS the harm, and the dollar amount is the magnitude.

[capybaraStorm]

Even the smallest understanding of utility of money will prove your assertion wildly inaccurate.

[s1artibartfast]

Are you making a legal point or a moral one?

Financial crimes are literally crimes that deprive people of their financial property. They are crimes because property is understood to have utility. This isnt rocket science.

[capybaraStorm]

I am the CEO of insurance company Inc (ICI).

Under me is 1000 salesman. Every salesman knows and understands I am selling a plan that will deny or delay for some covered minor ailments that once in a million set off a chain inducing death.

As CEO of ICI I collect $300M in premiums and from that take $3M.

After selling a million policies, a patient dies as a side effect of intentional strategy of denying authorization to pay for care. That plan is traced to going through a single salesman, who collected $5 from that sale and $50k in all his sales. From that same sales, I, the CEO only collected $1. That is, the dollar profit for the death is greater for the salesman than the CEO.

The salesman and I are both direct paths in the death, in fact the salesman more than me, hell the salesman even made more of a commission than I did. The public will likely hold me more in contempt.

[s1artibartfast]

Are you talking to me?

Can you explain what point are you making and how does it relate to what we were discussing?

[capybaraStorm]

My point is he (CEO) is viewed by many as most culpable for fraudulently denied claims at UHC -- and there are crimes, even non-financial ones like drug dealing, that tightly couple level of organization and sales of a product to differences in penalty for even a singe death. That is, this line of thinking is embedded in the USC.

[echoangle]

Is that a financial crime?