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My logic is most people would put themselves first at the cost of the greater good. So if it is well established logically that the greater good is for everyone to cooperate and not pay ransoms then it needs to be enforced for everyone.

It’s like pollution or recycling. Why spend the effort and cost to do it if the benefit is only to future generations or society as a whole (ignoring the few who do it for their own sense of self-satisfaction)? That’s why we have things like penalties for pollution and carbon credits.

These people are externalizing the cost of their actions. At the very least we shouldn’t allow ransom payers to externalize the real cost of the ransoms to future generations and society as a whole.



Yes, but like I said right at the beginning it works fantastically well as a sort of armchair theory. Same way we can sit here and say that drugs should be super illegal and the penalty should be death, voila, no more drugs, right? We know this doesn't work.

Making ransom payments super illegal wouldn't stop them from being made. People(parents in particular) would absolutely try to find a way to pay the ransom anyway to save their children, no matter the consequences. Like I said in another comment - what kind of punishment would stop the parent of a child in danger from paying the ransom? Years in prison? Most parents would gladly make that trade to make sure their kid goes home. There isn't a punishment here that you can establish to absolutely eliminate ransom payments, and as I'm sure you can see - as long as *any" are paid, criminals will keep using them as a tool. So imho, any effort(and therefore money) spent on fighting the ransom payers is completely wasted time and money. Not paying a ransom does not reduce the chance of further kidnappings significantly enough to make it worth it, and I'm nearly certain you can't come up with a punishment harsh enough to scare people away from making the payments.


> no more drugs, right? We know this doesn't work.

You can read what I wrote here about teh great firewall. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27103646

"No more drugs" is not the goal, neither is "no more ransoms." The goal is to reduce the reward for ransoms so that it is disincentivized to some degree.

If our disagreement is on how to stop X to an absolute degree, then I would agree with you for all Xs that it would be impossible, whether X be ransoms or logical fallacies.




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