That's still a policy failure -- poor enforcement/deterrence in that case rather than poor legislation, but still. And even to the extent that it is cultural, the policy informs the culture. If Eric Schmidt went to jail over that, would it happen again?
Apple at least sits on a huge pile of cash, yet Jobs colluded to steal billions from his own employees, the very folks who made the whole thing possible. You can't police that sort of sickness, it won't be healed by passing the right laws.
Your original statement was, "This is more of a political issue than a cultural one." I'm not saying it's not political, I'm saying it's also cultural, when we revere and lionize people like Jobs and Schmidt rather than putting them in prison.
Law is a tool for managing human wickedness. If we weren't wicked we wouldn't have invented law. That shows trivially that character is more fundamental than policy, eh?
> I'm not saying it's not political, I'm saying it's also cultural, when we revere and lionize people like Jobs and Schmidt rather than putting them in prison.
Whether we put them in prison is the policy decision. Culture influences policy in the same way that policy influences culture, but they're not the same thing -- and there are two different cultures here. One is that of the executives making the corporate decisions, the other is that of the voters/representatives making the political decisions. They could be wicked and we could still put them in jail.
> If we weren't wicked we wouldn't have invented law. That shows trivially that character is more fundamental than policy, eh?
If people weren't as wicked we wouldn't need laws. If we had better laws people wouldn't be as wicked. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? The undesired results are created by the existence of bad laws as well as the absence of good ones.
And more to the point, it's easier to change laws than culture. What would you suggest is the best way to affect the culture of corporate executives? Not even they can easily change it without a policy change, because the culture is derived from the existing policies and the corresponding consequences. The executives who cheat and steal and don't get caught are the ones who get bonuses and promotions and end up running the largest corporations.
Culture isn't static, it evolves based on the environment -- and the biggest part of the environment we have any control over is the laws. Bad laws suppress wages and cause economic inefficiency and wealth inequality, so here we are. Half the regulations on the books were passed under the guise of taking from the top, but the people actually at the top have the resources to avoid them so what they really do in general is take from the middle. But the middle is the place we wanted the people at the bottom to get to -- so all we're doing is making it harder for them to do that while pushing the people who are already there further down.
If you want to improve the culture, get rid of the bad laws and actually enforce the good ones.
If life on Earth were simple enough that "good enough" laws were even possible (not difficult, not tricky, but possible to formulate at all even by a legislature populated by very stable geniuses), then we would not have evolved such large brains.
After all, Gödel showed that any powerful system of rules will contain inconsistencies. Even closed tautological systems like the Catholic religion contain flaws (that was the premise of the movie "Dogma": two banished angels find a loophole in God's Law and attempt to destroy the Universe) and theologians literally get to define God.
Any system of human law must be inconsistent, so we perforce rely on human judges, which means we rely on their [lack of] wickedness, i.e. their culture, and we are back where we started.
> If we had better laws people wouldn't be as wicked.
Meaning no disrespect, that is a proposition to which I assign a low truth value.
I read "Walden II"[1] at an impressionable age, and I thought for a long time that if we could just make the "right" laws, construct the right system, then we could easily achieve Utopia. I was too young to realize that the novel is actually "behaviorist" propaganda.[2]
My own experience of humans, and something Gandhi said, later convinced me that law, no matter how good or wise, cannot of itself make for good people. I've never been able to find the actual quote, but it was something like, "No system [of government] relieves the people under it from the burden [or obligation] of trying to be better human beings."
If prison worked to convince people to take up that burden I don't think recidivism rates would be as high as they are, eh?
So, again, I don't reject that good and just laws are a vital part of a good and just society, but I see them as a result, not a cause.
