this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2024
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Showerthoughts
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It’s not a real life trolley problem, because there is no mechanism by which killing this CEO saves lives.
There is. There's reason to think the CEO was targeted specifically because of his shitty policies. If enough CEOs were eliminated for the same reason, the rest might start remembering they have a duty to society.
(This is not a call for violence, and I am not advocating for it, this is answering a direct question about how and why the mechanic might exist)
It’s just not a good solution to the agency problem. Coercing someone with a gun to get you $300 from the ATM requires constant presence and the gun sticking into their back continuously. Trying to use the threat of possible assassination to get someone to act in a CEO role in a way beneficial to their millions of customers, that’s just not stable.
Using threat of punishment to motivate behavior is extremely unstable even in the tightest, simplest circumstances. Like you gotta be on the ball to get that person to punch in their ATM code and hand you the bills. Even that straightforward action is barely stable in terms of the incentive structure.
You simply can’t coerce a class of people with targeted assassinations. It’s too loose, too abstract, to unstable as a mechanism of control.
All of how our society operates is under threat of punishment when you have no access to food housing or healthcare by not making an income. If you we have threat of punishment for the working class we can also have threat of punishment for the owners. It's the only way to fairly enforce the social contract under our current economic system. Obviously it's bad to operate this way and what we are seeing is a direct result of a class of people not being held accountable for their end of the social contract.