Being the sort of candidate who motivates special interests to spend a fortune trying to stop you from getting elected makes you a weaker candidate, if all else is equal, where “weaker” here is referring to electability rather than ideology or the preferences of a Platonic ideal public.
Benson is the governor-elect.
El-Sayed with 2,497,852 and Benson with 2,591,316 as of right now. I haven’t added up all the other candidates but according to the votes to percentage ratios, about the same number of people voted in each contest.
2,497,852 / 52.52 = 47,560
2,591,316 / 54.54 = 47,512
demolished the conventional wisdom that Democrats need to run cautious, corporate-friendly centrists to win in purple and red states
Hah, no. We’ll have the year of the Linux desktop before that ever happens. Leftist candidates won because the Democrats were so strongly favored that even weak candidates won, but the leftists did worse than a generic Democrat would have done.
El-Sayed, for example, won Michigan 52.5 to 45.5 as of the current count. Meanwhile the Democratic candidate for governor Jocelyn Benson won 54.5 to 43.7. There were enough people voting for her but not for him to swing a normal election to the Republicans.
No one in the world who would do any of those things has ever worried that he was being creepy in a non-sexual situation. Meanwhile the whole point of the worry that you’re being creepy in a non-sexual situation is that stuff you would comfortably say to another man might sound weird to a woman.
You don’t need to know the profit - it’s the corporation’s job to estimate that before making a decision. You just need to know the cost of the harm done and the chance that a violator will be caught and fined.
The OP is proposing that there shouldn’t be a cap specifically because we don’t cap the size of corporations.
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.
The OP is proposing that a fine (whether or not it is capped) should have some relation to the size of the corporation being fined, and I’m saying why that’s wrong.
Caps make sense in some circumstances (like how a library’s overdue book fine caps at the price of replacing the book). I don’t know anything about the Canadian fisheries act and whether its cap is reasonable, but a reasonable cap (if there is one) generally shouldn’t have anything to do with the size of the corporation, unlike what OP proposes.
The cost of the violation is determined in advance, and should be proportional to how much it would cost to pay people to accept the risk of harm, not how much it would cost to undo the harm. People are usually quite willing to accept a small risks of harm even if that harm can’t be undone. For example, currently US government policy generally values the life of an American at (IIRC) about eight million dollars, which corresponds to the average American being willing to take a one in a million chance of dying for eight dollars. Someone who takes that bet gets eight dollars even if he’s the unlucky one who dies.
I never said that corporate fines are a deterrent for bad behavior. Recouping the cost to society should be the sole motivation for the fines. If the cost of the fine is less than the cost of compliance but more than the cost of the harm done, then corporations should break the rule and pay the fine. Everyone is, in expectation, better off that way.
Corporations aren’t moral agents, and therefore a fine against a corporation should be intended to compensate for the illicit harm done (adjusted by the probability of getting caught). The compensation necessary does not depend on how much money the corporation has available. In other words, it’s like a “you break it, you buy it” policy - you charge as much as the broken thing costs, regardless of how much money the person who broke it happens to have.
Edit: here’s another way of thinking about it. A corporation’s motivation to break a rule is equal to (expected_profit - fine * chance_of_getting_caught). You want that motivation to be less than the harm breaking the rule does. The size of the corporation isn’t a variable in the equation.
The woman wanted to go to a pet store to see the animals, she asked to hold a ferret, and the ferret bit her. For some reason I still don’t understand, I immediately bought that ferret, although I had never even seen a ferret before that day. (He was a cool dude, but he did think nipping people was funny.)
Both can be true at the same time.
I didn’t even notice that she had a wardrobe malfunction back when I saw the movie as a kid - I only learned that bit of Star Wars trivia a few years later when I got internet access. I think they left it in, but I also figure that Femi Taylor probably had pasties on under that costume anyway.
Return of the Jedi Special Edition in 1997 was a… formative experience for me.
Imagine if I had a collectible Lex Luthor action figure which you really wanted - you would be willing to pay me $100 for it. Then you stopped thinking that superhero stuff was cool and didn’t want the action figure anymore for more than $10. What has changed about the world is that I no longer have the option to get the $90 difference from you by selling the action figure, but only because you would keep the $90. No money went anywhere. However, market value was reduced. If my action figure and your money were all that existed in the world, then the world would no longer be a place with $200 of value. It would now only have $110 of value, and in that sense it would be a worse place to the extent that market value corresponds to happiness or abstract utility.
Wealth is not a conserved quantity. You can reduce my wealth just by wanting what I have less, even if afterwards we both have exactly what we had before.
https://www.bart.gov/about/financials/crisis
There are fewer than half as many total riders as there were before the pandemic.
It makes the candidate weaker than he would otherwise be if everything else was equal, but you’re right that a candidate opposed by special interests can overall be stronger than a candidate not opposed by them. My point is just that you can’t judge a candidate’s strength or weakness as something independent of those attack ads.