I was just reading about a violation of the Canadian fisheries act that has a maximum penalty of $200k, and realized the absurdity of there ever being a maximum fine.
There should be no maximum fine on any corporate penalty given that we do not cap the size of corporations or their bank accounts.
It would be like having maximum jail terms of 25 years for immortal beings that can live to 10,000.
There’s no contradiction. You want the motivation to be less than the harm breaking the rule does, not because you want to deter the corporation from ever breaking the rule but because if that condition is satisfied then society is actually better off if the corporation does break the rule (and pay the fine). Let’s say you have a rule against dumping toxic waste. You decide that having one less gallon of toxic waste dumped is worth $1,000 to you. If the corporation can make a profit of more than $1,000 per gallon by dumping the waste, it dumps the waste, you get paid, and both sides benefit.
This is such strange logic. No. You want the company to not break the rule, otherwise it’s not a rule. Therefore the fine should be to a point where breaking it would be so determental to their business that they do everything to not break it.
Its like after gdpr came in a lot of shady USAian companies simply geoblocked European IP addresses as they knew the potential fines were so massive
Bud you need to go outside and give your head a shake.
Your whole argument is based on the naiive idea that everything has a clear cut nominal cost that can be easily measured.
The reality is that things like environmental destruction and abuses of labour, have costs and impacts that ripple across generations with uncountable numbers of secondary effects. When toxic waste is dumped and it causes family members to get cancer that requires not only treating the actual patients, but all the time suffering, and waste to all of their friends and family members, and all of the environmental remediation that can never actually be completed.
Not everything is reversible or fixable.
You need to grow up and stop relying on simple cost models to explain everything. Corporate fines are not tolls that are expected to be paid. They are punishments for breaking the law and are there to deter corporations from doing so.