It is to discourage/prevent future occurrence. We know Madoff was a sociopath who could look his best friends and little old ladies straight in the eye while taking their money to the cleaners. He doesn't give a damn basically. But most people are concerned about their family, as evolutionary biologist will argue because of overlapping genetic material. If their actions could impoverish their loved ones, they might think twice about their actions. Madoff clearly was sneaking loot to his relations as a means of letting them benefit while he was going down. So the loss of his innocent relation's net worths would be collateral damage towards generating the signal to discourage future Madoffs. I do think greater good would arise from a society out of an occasional Deus ex Machina that smites the reckless and unapologetically guilty through their loved ones. To some degree, the promise of Eternal Damnations indoctrinated by religion in days of yore aided and abetted better behaviour within society. I'm not saying this is a workable law, since you have to define at what level of severity of fraud it kicks ... etc. I just said if I were *King* this is what I would do.
... and I'm not saying "group" punishment should be used in all instances. If you've been in the military, you know how effective group punishment is - and the group generally doesn't resent it because it builds group solidarity oddly enough, tapping into some deep psychological seams in us as human beings. However, it steers the group strongly towards conformism. No, I'm saying this is one of those last resort things you need to have on hand when you have to deal with true sociopaths. You can't really keep this kind of power of punishment under check, so I don't recommend it for a code of law. You really need a benevolent tyrant to execute this kind of thing. As for the "regardless of guilt" issue, the reality is that almost all criminal instances, in the investigation, the prosecution and the sentencing, there is a tremendous amount of "slippage". Bad people don't get caught, good people get mistakenly caught. People get over sentenced or under sentenced, whatever that means. So there is a tremendous amount of collateral damage that goes on within the legal system anyway. We prefer not to have it spelled out for us and codified, but it is there. We don't want to get into the business of openly sanctioning collateral damage through group punishment because it violates individual rights, but lets not get too aghast at the actual quantum of collateral damage we're talking about here - only the money from two dozen relations, not jail time. This is peanuts compared to the normal level of daily collateral damage in the criminal justice system. A lot of concepts behind those thoughts - but basically this is for if I was *King* ie a monarchy.
what a marvelous idea. someday when everybody's dna will be in a data bank. the gov't will go look for the sibling of the sociopath who he has never met and lives 3000 miles away. perhaps u are a sociopath pretending to be a student. one thing u are right. everything belong to the monarch. u will soon learn that your paycheck belongs to king obama.
Glad to see Madoff's wife has been forced to give back some money. How and when will they distribute it ? Will it be given back as per need ? ( like the lady forced to look in the garbage bins for food ) or by size of loss, where the wealthier and less in need will get more ?
He paid the wages of his employees out of the Ponzi. He paid his taxes out of the Ponzi. He paid restaurants, high-end boutique stores, tailors out of the Ponzi. So either you think all those recipients should have ALL their assets seized, or you think that merely being paid out of the Ponzi per se does not in any way justify seizing all someone's assets. Since the first one is clearly ridiculous, you have to agree with me - there is no other sensible option.
But you said you would seize all their assets regardless of guilt. In other words, if a single Madoff relative was feeding the poor somewhere in the 3rd world, and refused to accept any money from Bernie (some people don't like leeching off the lucky sperm lottery), you would personally steal their hard-earned assets just because they were a blood relative of a con-artist. My questions are very simple: is it fair? What good things would it achieve? And at what potential cost? I don't see any justification under any of those 3 categories. It's horrifically unfair, it wouldn't achieve anything good, and it would have huge costs. As a policy it would be rated 0/10.
The kids were complicit. They knew that the MMing operation could not possibly fund that level of salary. Ruth Madoff should have kept the Palm Beach home as well as the Manhattan coop, per your argument.