Vigilante Assassination May Be OK
United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson is not necessarily a good example though
As I noted here, very few people seem to be saddened by the assassination of Brian Thompson. The left are of course cheering because they like seeing the rich killed. The right are making dank memes (see above) and reposting Xeets like this
and
The people who are expressing regrets at his death are doing so more from a “this is a bad precedent” take and a “killing is a step to far” take rather than standing up and saying the Brian Thompson was a great guy who ran a wonderful company that spread joy and happiness across America. They aren’t doing that because it seems that everyone who has (or had) health insurance from United Healthcare has a negative story about their treatment or reimbursement. United Healthcare might actually be less popular than the IRS in terms of organizations Americans have to interact with.
Thompson seems to have been a pretty mediocre CEO who was remarkably well reimbursed for his job. It seems he trousered around US$ 30 million a year, a sum which is similar to baseball legend Shohei Ohtani1. That’s a huge amount of money for someone who ran a company that is as widely hated as United Healthcare.
That doesn’t exactly explain the glee at his death, but it does explain I think why a lot of regular people are unmoved by the arguments people like Alex Berenson make that we should not celebrate his death.
What Berenson fails to mention is that United Healthcare is (perceived as) a scummy company which profits from immiserating the people it is supposed to help. There is hearsay evidence that United Healthcare knowingly and deliberately makes it hard for people to claim and so on:
UHC routinely engages in fraud entirely separate from this. Including their auto deny AI. And giving <30 min windows for docs to call back and appeal a decision with <30 min notice. They also deny covered services. And engage in fraudulent clawbacks.
Not to mention charging govt for services not rendered.
This isnt even touching their vertical integration and how it enables financial abuse. Or how they bankrupt independent pharmacies and physician organizations by breaching contract, then buy them out.
UHCs abuses are well known, and they go far beyond the general headache that is american health insurance.
UHC is a criminal organization by any definition of the law.. Entirely separate from the overall structural mess that is American healthcare.
(source: a medical person I know)
And you can search the internets with your search engine of choice and find many similar anecdotes and statements. Thompson was CEO of a company that is widely disliked but which people have to interact with because of government mandates and regulations (Obamacare) because there are frequently no (better) alternatives. Maybe he didn’t deserve being shot in the back in a New York street, but you’ll forgive me if I fail to find much sympathy for him. I’m entirely happy to create or share dank memes but I do have a certain degree of sympathy with both the “this is a bad precedent” take and a “killing is a step to far” take.
Perhaps the closest to defending Thompson is Noah Smith, who points out that health insurance companies are just one part of the broken US healthcare system and that UHC isn’t very profitable
You can see that the company’s net income — i.e., its total profit — was $23.1 billion in 2023. That’s a lot of money, but it pales in comparison to the $241.9 billion that the company spent on medical costs.2 Even the company’s $54.6 billion in operating costs — of which Brian Thompson’s own $10 million salary represented 0.018% — are dwarfed by actual medical costs.
What does this mean? It means that if UnitedHealth Group decided to donate every single dollar of its profit to buying Americans more health care, it would only be able to pay for about 9.3% more health care than it’s already paying for. If it donated all of its executives’ salaries to the effort, it would not be much more than that.
I’m sure that’s true. I suspect that a bigger issue is that ambulance chasing lawyers mean that the medical profession has a strong incentive to do excessive numbers of tests and prescribe the latest, greatest pills because those are ways to defend against medical malpractice lawsuits (and let’s not forget the premiums of those malpractice insurance policies). But it doesn’t really matter. Health insurers are perceived as the bad guys because they do deny claims and because they make their offerings remarkably opaque. And it seems to me that while they may not be the only bad actors in the US healthcare mess they aren’t precisely angels or innocent victims, but are complicit in a failure to try fixing the mess.
Justifying Assassination
Beyond the screwed up US healthcare system, I understand why people of all political stripes are happy to see Thompson gunned down. The reason is that we are in a two tier system when it comes to risks vs rewards. The “top men” (which includes top women and persons of indeterminate gender) are generally insulated from failure while the average working class or middle class person is not.
If you are, say, my friend and fellow substacker Tom Knighton and you try to run a local newspaper then when that fails you have to scramble to pay debts and find other work to keep your family fed. If you are the CEO of a bank that loaned millions in sub-prime mortgages that then went sour, then you get moved to EVP special projects when the Fed/government strong arms Chase into buying your bank and you get to keep all the secondary board positions and the like that pay $millions. Plus you don’t have to pay back any of the $millions you received as salary and bonuses in the years before the wheels fell off. So yes. Maybe you have to sell the yacht and the second home in Aspen, but you get to keep the one in Hawaii and so on. Probably the worst thing that happens to you is that some congresscritters haul you up in front of them in DC and make you look like a moron as they grandstand for the press.
That also applies if you are the CEO of a healthcare company that profits from ethically questionable actions or a pharmaceutical company that produces a “vaccine” that contains large fragments of DNA that seem likely to cause cancer2
If you are the government official who oversaw said pharma company and all sorts of other things that caused major global impoverishment as well as, almost certainly, millions of avoidable deaths and injuries you actually get a government funded secret security detail when you retire3 instead of a Romanian Christmas present.
Needless to say all these top men get to reap the rewards of their success when it looks like it was a success and they don’t have to pay the money back when it turns out the success was illusory.
This contrasts significantly with actual entrepreneurs who struggle with regulations and taxes as they try to get their ideas to sell. Frequently they find that the regulations they fight are welcomed by their larger competitors. Not for nothing have economists and others talked about “regulatory capture” where large incumbents in a regulated sector work with the regulators to make it hard for new entrants.
A recent substack by Tim Worstall4 makes this point clearly.
There really is a bureaucratic and managerial class that gains the incomes and power of the capitalists of the past without having to do anything quite so grubby as either risk their own money or, actually, do anything. They, umm, administer, and the entire class is wholly and absolutely convinced that everything must be administered and they’re the right people to be doing that.
Right now if you are in the right class and circles you reap rewards and skate away from failures with little if any loss. That’s an extremely unhealthy situation and it has to be fixed. Assassination may do that because it gives the professional managerial class a potential extremely negative outcome if they are preceived to have done bad things by hoi polloi.
Pour Encourager Les Autres
Back in the 18th century the Royal Navy was perceived to have a similar problem with senior officers skating failure while their juniors were punished. That ended dramatically with the court martial and subsequent execution of Admiral Byng after he lost a battle with the French. There are plenty of reasons to question whether that particular court martial verdict was justified5 but there is no doubt that the Navy’s senior officers as a whole got the message that failure to achieve victory could have drastic consequences for commanding officers.
The episode gained extra publicity when Voltaire used it as a scene in Candide and caused a character to utter “Dans ce pays-ci, il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres” (In this country, it is good to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others).
I would prefer that CEOs and other top people face sanctions other than assassination for their mis-steps, but as with the Navy in the 18th century they don’t seem to. If they continue to evade consequences for their misteps by legal means, then extra-judicial methods like assassination become attractive. There are rumors that Resident Biden’s minders plan for him to issue broad pardons to a large swathe of politicians and bureaucrats that are justifiably concerned that a Trump regime will seek to do unto them what they attempted to do unto him. If those pardons happen I will be entirely unsurprised if a few of the pardoned are victims.
As this Xeet notes, this seems like a crime that is susceptible to copy-catting.
The most likely outcome here is that the murderer goes to prison for life, as he should, but as a dark underdog or even a hero to many who hold legitimate grudges against certain companies. There are many copycats looking at this story and making plans… writing their script. Do they follow through? Can’t say, but a genre of crime has just been reincarnated - Billy the Kid, Bonnie and Clyde - bad people with favorable folk tales.
I’m very curious to watch how today’s thought leaders field this one.
Last thought: If I’m a high ego, high visibility CEO (or other public figure) in an industry with strong negative sentiment, I’m rethinking my entire pattern of life. A red line has been crossed and it can’t be uncrossed.
I agree we probably can’t put this jack back in the box again. In fact we know we can’t because we’ve seen 2 (3?) attempts on President Trump in the last few months.
Sadly the likely reaction of the professional managerial class to threats of assassination will not be to consider whether they did bad things, were wrong or harmed people unnecessarily but to hunker down in bunkers, hire guards and so on and charge the rest of us for their increased security. That’s not healthy for them or society as a whole.
Ohtani’s 10 year $300M deal while enormous is likely to pay off handsomely for the Dodgers. Based on coverage in Japan I suspect the Dodgers have now made it to the point where they are a global brand (at least in baseball playing countries) and are therefore able to sell TV rights, merchandize etc. to a large number places and people they previously could not as just another MLB team.
See this - https://www.historynet.com/john-byng-the-scapegoating-of-an-admiral/ - and lots of other links you can find by searching the internets
When the ancien regime emiserates the people, violence and revolution sometimes erupt. Many people are fed up with the corruption and failure of governments around the world. This might be the start of something.
I have to admit, I'm not down with assassinating CEOs. Such, in my opinion, is not only crude, rude and unmannerly, it's also ineffective and counterproductive. There are always ten more in line where that one came from.
The real problem, as I see it, we're all living in a fascist/socialist/totalitarian, whatever you want to call it world these days. Adam Smith's invisible hand is crushed 'neath the iron boots of our duly appointed governors, be they CEOs, deans, media magnates, presidents or local aldermen.
In sixty some years I've gone from leaning socialist ("If you’re not a socialist before you’re twenty-five, you have no heart;") to conservative (" if you are a socialist after twenty-five, you have no head.") to piratical anarcho-capitalist (If you're not a pirate after seventy five, you have no future.).
I don't view anarcho-capitalism as a replacement for fascist/socialist/totalitarian, or whatever but as a parallel, in the cracks system.
For example legal immigrants from the Orient, Vietnamese if I remember right, found it problematic getting business loans from U.S. banks. They subsequently formed local associations wherein successful, profitable Vietnamese businesses would band together loaning startup funds to newcomers who would, when successful pay back their loans, band together and etc.
Now I must allow that setting up a parallel, piratical health insurance system, for example is not a minor project. However if you get some local doctors, pharmacies, etc. on board early, such just might be possible and far more practical than shooting CEOs.