Corporate fines should be in % of the company income.

I would also argue that personal fines should be like that too.

I've been saying it for years and years now, fines need to be proportionate to a person's or company's assets and earnings.

I saw a comment suggesting companies should "go to jail" like a criminal would, and you have them limit how much they are allowed to interact with the public world until their sentence is up.

I think it's a pretty interesting way to deal with it. It makes sense for retribution and it forces companies to have cash on hand to cover costs while "locked up" to cover costs. It would really make businesses risk averse.

Yeah; we very obvious need to move to gross-revenue-based fines. Megacorps can effectively ignore dollar-value fines, since even the maximal amounts are so relatively minuscule that they’re simply seen and handled as an OpEx line item, so there’s effectively zero deterrence factor.

Some (too few) laws have such fines. One example is the European Union's Digital Services Act which states: Fines up to 1% of the worldwide annual turnover can be imposed.

Fines for natural persons based on income and wealth are rare, but exist. Finland and its traffic violations is one example. The story is that happiness was great when a senior executive of Nokia was caught for such a violation some years ago whe n Nokia was still relevant.

When we talk about prison reform, we talk about the three main functions of prison: incapacitation, rehabilitation and deterrence. Corporate persons are conceptual, amoral agents incapable of personal growth, so I don't think rehabilitation is a useful lens for thinking about corporate fines, but I think deterrence and incapacitation are worthwhile. Fines as a percentage of corporate income speaks to incapacitation -- a corporation with less money can do less harm -- but it doesn't address deterrence. In a perfectly efficient capitalist economy, we should expect that corporations will take any option that nets more revenue than it costs to implement, inclusive of any fines, and the fine is only deterrent if it makes the offense so expensive as to be unprofitable, which is only loosely correlated with corporate income. I'd say, it's the maximum of: a percentage of corporate income, the cost to fix the damage, and the amount of profit the corporation derived from the fined behavior.

Seems like every corporation should have a designated group of upper execs who assume responsibility for illegal corporate actions. I know they can sometimes be found guilty of knowingly making decisions that break the law, but the complexity of business makes placing blame on an individual extremely difficult. It should be a more straightforward liability they accept with the job. Some of these people make so ridiculously much money from their positions, they should bear a corresponding degree of responsibility.

Fines should be based on a percentage of the companies income.

20% of 30 billion dollars is gonna hurt a lot more than a 20 million dollar fine. especially if that 20 mil fine is based on an evil act that made the company 800mil.

and guess what? they can avoid the fines by stop being fucking vile ass evil piles of shit.

If corporations want to be treated like people, they should also go to jail and/or be executed for great enough crimes.

Same argument holds for individuals, there are many violations that are capped there too (at least in my country)

I've been screaming for decades now, that we need wealth caps. Why the fuck is it okay and acceptable that a single person can get full % of the entire world's wealth? Or whyneven do we allow billionaires? Or centillionaires. Nobody should be able to have a networth of over, say, 5 million dollars. You reach that limit, all your additional income goes to taxes, 100%. And, of course, if you're at, say, 4 million, the income tax should already be around 90% or so to avoid shenanigans with a rolling income / expenses scheme

When we no longer have billionaires, the game changes significantly. No longer will one single narcissist be able to accumulate power. Resources will have to be spread over the population as no single person can own a large company.

This will also limit the size of any company. A single person can have a million dollar home, a million in other things like cars, etc, and thenaybe have 2-3 millions tops to invest in companies. This means that a billion dollar company will need at least 500 relatively rich people to be share holders, and in reality it likely will be more like 5000... This will limit the size of companies, this will make smaller companies that are more focused on fewer products.

Putting this single limit in place, world wide, will change the world in an extreme way

It will also never happen until politicians will actually start listening to citizens and citizens will be educated enough to understand what they're voting for, and politicians be required to not lie... So yeah, good luck.