this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2025
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The difference is that capitalists aren't desperate. They commit crimes just to make numbers get bigger. Just fining corporations for doing crimes doesn't do anything, because then it just becomes a cost of doing business. You must attack the people in the corporations making the decisions to make money, and the death penalty is one of the tools for that.
To understand the use of the death penalty, imagine how many worker hours a capitalist who steals a billion dollars takes away. Assuming the average US salary (~$66,000) and working lifespan (77.43 years - 20 yr childhood), they've stolen the entire life earnings of 264 Americans. These calcs look even worse for any non-U.S. country because the theft is usually done in USD, but all the workers make a much less valuable currency.
As of now, China mostly uses death sentence with reprieve for financial crimes, which means that if the sentenced person doesn't commit another crime in a couple years, their sentence gets demoted to life sentence. Actual execution has only been used for extreme cases, such as Sichuan mining tycoon Liu Han, worth $6.4 billion, for his crime syndicate of gambling, loan sharking, illicit arms trading, contract killing, and actual lethal shootings.^[https://time.com/3700907/liu-han-execution-china/]
Thanks for the context on how China does it. As far as the rest of it goes, I'm in total agreement that the damage done by some of these people is extremely egregious. I am specifically disagreeing on the idea of fear as a tactic, especially as it relates to the death penalty, in a general principle way. There may be some contexts where it makes sense, but if we're talking about it in the abstract, it just comes off like the usual punitive philosophy on crime that is common in, for example, the US. Surely there is far more to it than fear of punishment that helps deter the capitalists in a place like China - that's kind of where my mind goes with it. I don't think fear is generally a healthy mechanism to be using against a populace and I'm doubtful that it does much as a deterrent, especially without negative side effects. But there is also the ideal and the conditions, and sometimes the conditions demand things that are not the ideal to get through. So that's where I try to emphasize that I'm talking about the idea of it, not trying to judge how existing socialist projects do things, especially without understanding why.