You overestimate managerial competence and underestimate misaligned incentives and the ability of people to justify the existence of their jobs by inflating the importance of useless tasks to management.
Relationships between an individual and a corporation are fundamentally asymmetrical. They can only be made equal by heavily favouring the single human side.
People, culture, values, morals and ethics predate law. The code of Hammurabi reflects those aspects of ancient Babylon.
Law must reflect to some degree and scope, the morals of its culture or people. If this does not happen for enough time and affects enough people, then you see a regression to tribal or vigilante justice.
Law is a form of centrally managed punishments that strongly influence individuals to behave according to the local population's values, morals and ethics.
What if a small class of people with enough resources, wit and motivation can hack this system to their favor? How will the rest of the population react when they realize this had been going on for years? Will they be able to "patch the bug" in the code of law and stop the exploiters?
What happened with the CEO of a system that is antithetical to American values, culture and morals, is an individual workaround to a long running lethal bug ignored by the maintainers of the code of law. This was ignored because the maintainers are a cog in the machine of that small class.
I agree with law and democracy, but we may no longer have that since the bigger population has no agency to shape laws. We may just have some other unnamed system that on the surface looks like law and democracy, but under the hood seems to be an oligarchy.
I agree with most of what you wrote as hypotheticals, I just disagree it describes things as they are.
I don't know why you are so eager to think people don't have agency or can't influence society. So many things change all the time. Just one example - twenty years ago most gay people lived in secret, because being out was a huge problem for society; the idea of gay marriage was ridiculously distant. Today, in most places, it's seen as a non-issue.
That didn't happen by chance. It happened because of the hard dedicated work of a lot of people, who convinced society to see things differently, and won.
While I feel similarly to you I would argue that society have two well working indicators of disconnect between enacted laws and average morals/perception of reality:
- violence
- sentiment towards violence justification
And if anything this murder shows the extent of issue of the disconnect above.
Bad analogy, a student is not being evaluated for a position where he controls the lives of millions.
10 people were competing for president, a position with significant power. Whoever you elect will have powers immediately so you cannot afford to kick cheaters out after the fact, only before.
This election game is played in two rounds. If you find a cheater before the first round, what happens if you remove him? There's 9 left. What about in the second round where it's 1v1? You just gave away the presidency to last candidate.
Romania acted too late in kicking the cheater out. Maybe there were reasons for that, but this means re-running the elections without the cheater might be the lesser evil.
Nobody will declare war on their neighbour when they depend on them for food and other essential resources.
The EU addresses resource and cultural motivations.
NATO intimidates countries that already want to take resources from their neighbours.
NATO has its merit as well, but the EU is unarguably one of the main reasons why EU countries have not even begun to think about creating military conflict within member states since the 1950s.
