We need to be careful how we allocate power. A judge having the power to single-handedly take down a business is too much.
Power corrupts. Corrupt actions by the powerful you agree with today, can be turned against you tomorrow.
this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2026
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
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- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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I agree, there should not be a maximum.
Corporations aren't moral agents, and therefore a fine against a corporation should be intended to compensate for the illicit harm done (adjusted by the probability of getting caught). The compensation necessary does not depend on how much money the corporation has available. In other words, it's like a "you break it, you buy it" policy - you charge as much as the broken thing costs, regardless of how much money the person who broke it happens to have.
Edit: here's another way of thinking about it. A corporation's motivation to break a rule is equal to (expected_profit - fine * chance_of_getting_caught). You want that motivation to be less than the harm breaking the rule does. The size of the corporation isn't a variable in the equation.
But the size of the profit will also scale with the size of the company. A small company will have less to invest so the absolute money value they'll take in profit will be less than a huge company. A larger company with more money behind it will have a higher monetary risk threshold too, so the fine needs to reflect that.
Doing the fine by the value of the company isn't perfect, but it is much easier to calculate than trying to determine how much they expected to make.
You don't need to know the profit - it's the corporation's job to estimate that before making a decision. You just need to know the cost of the harm done and the chance that a violator will be caught and fined.
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Fine should be the cost to repair the damage plus a percentage of net worth as a penalty.
Now we open the can of worms to calculate damage for environmental and medical expenses against the propaganda, lobbying, legal and "expert" opinion of giant corporate groups having legal funds larger than some national budgets, and more "speech" aka money that you. But it is a start I guess.
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