Risks

I once was thrown off a US conservative discussion forum for suggesting that if the wingnuts wished the US to continue its military interventionist foreign policy, they must also accept that its enemies would sometimes strike back and kill large numbers of American civilians. I think this was around the time of the London and Madrid bombings, and they were all busy calling the Spanish cowards for wanting to leave their magic neocon adventure in Asia. How many Americans were they willing to sacrifice to support their politics? It's a brutal way to frame something like that to that crowd, and I can't say I was surprised at my ejection, but in a purely economic calculation, there are particularly unpleasant risks to being involved in any sort action that harms other people.

If you harm the lives and livelihoods of [innocent] people, you're also giving those people a sort of licence to harm yours. Whether your cause is just is subjective and irrelevant to the operation of the equation.

So when looking at the threats faced by execs around their bonuses, I wonder if they factored in these risks when it struck them as a good idea to get obscenely wealthy at the expense of others. I doubt they even thought about it. Or, if they did, maybe they couched it in some grand psuedo-philisophical bullshit about individualism and markets or something. Whatever the case, there are risks and costs.

I would prefer to see some sort of legitimate legal means for punishing decimating the parasite class. Maybe more because I think mob rule is a very bad direction to head, than out of any sort of pacifist tendencies. But I'm not convinced this will happen, or even if it does, that it will be enough to prevent people from doing what they do.