[cooperaustinj]

> This statement doesn't mean anything useful. That might be true if that wasn't a well known phrase that carries decades of examples behind it.

> It also describes every social safety net. Social safety nets are not spending millions of billions of dollars on disasters, especially disasters we've been predicting since the dawn of industry. Social safety nets have upper bounds. Being able to handle these disasters is a benefit of society, yes. Social safety nets help people get on their feet, not prevent entire towns from being wiped out. It's disingenuous to imply America's social safety net (which it doesn't have) has anything to do with this.

When individuals create liability this large, they are jailed. When corporations do it, we pretend we never could have expected this outcome.

[kortilla]

> That might be true if that wasn't a well known phrase that carries decades of examples behind it.

It is true and there are decades of examples. It’s just meaningless because it matches every social safety net so you can use it to argue against anything you want.

> Social safety nets are not spending millions of billions of dollars on disasters, especially disasters we've been predicting since the dawn of industry.

They are. Look at the military, which is another example of everyone paying in but small groups receiving outsized benefits on many different fronts.

> Social safety nets help people get on their feet, not prevent entire towns from being wiped out.

This is what FEMA is for.

> It's disingenuous to imply America's social safety net (which it doesn't have) has anything to do with this.

You can’t even form a coherent sentence here. You can’t on one hand defend the safety net from a comparison and simultaneously claim it doesn’t exist. If it didn’t exist, you wouldn’t reply.

> When individuals create liability this large, they are jailed.

No they aren’t. People in positions of power in the government do this all of the time and receive absolutely no punishment. One regulation change can decimate people’s homes, jobs, paths to citizenship, etc.

> When corporations do it, we pretend we never could have expected this outcome.

No we don’t. It’s the reason many of the corporate insurance programs exist (superfund, fdic, etc).