I think he was just pointing out that a person choosing to do drugs is different than a business breaking the law for profit.
Some businesses will engage in ethical and lawful behaviors because they are run by people of high moral standard that will not allow themselves to be comprised.
Other businesses will model the risk/reward in terms of profits and see if acting ethically or unethically yields the most profit. They will then do whatever yields the most profit, given an acceptable level of risk, whether that involves unlawful and unethical behaviors or not.
My original post is pretty oversimplified, but it gets to the heart of the problem. If a business truly errs and breaks the law unknowingly and is acting in an ethical manner then they should correct the action and make right the situation. In this case no additional penalty, or a minimal fine would seem to be in accordance with the behavior.
If the business is on the other hand deliberately breaking the law and/or acting unethically then the penalty needs to be high enough that it offsets the potential profits/rewards so as to keep unethical businesses in check.
The problem is determining when is it an unintentional mistake, and when was it calculated?
In this case EFI is claiming it was an oversight/mistake, but that seems unlikely. Proving that it was deliberate and unethical can be more difficult.
It's a pretty well solved problem, you look around the world find out which justice systems produce low recidivism rates and implement those policies.
You'll find that there's little correlation between recidivism rate and length of sentence / amount of fine.
Or you can do what they do in America where they have the worlds largest prison population, which is hand out excessively harsh fines and prison sentences for relatively minor issues.
Protip: If you want people to act like the law is any different than separating the wheat from the chaff it would behoove one to stop referring to people in that manner. Instead you might want to say something like "How can we persuade people to my way of thinking?"
My meaning was not, "how can we persuade people to my way of thinking", rather it was how do we identify who has made an honest mistake and who was acting in a deliberate manner so as to punish the two differing groups accordingly.
I'm well aware of that, which is why I was pointing out the pointlessness of punishing people but not reforming their behaviour.
So lets pretend you know of a fool proof way to figure out who is making honest mistakes, and who is being deliberate, now you can your retribution, but you won't change their behaviour.
