Looking for fellow anarchocapitalists.

[Darryl_P]

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Selling a pack of gum to a serial killer is a lot different than hiring one.


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True, but it's not much different from saying "two dollars please" when a dude rolls up in his car to enter a stretch of road, which was one of your examples.

I used to be pretty high up in the tobacco industry and we had some big clients who were known criminals, and I don't just mean tax evasion which you could argue is not a crime. I mean nasty stuff like killing, hiring hitmen and that sort of thing. OK we didn't have it on videotape and you could say it was gossip or whatever, but the info. was pretty reliable nonetheless because our guys needed to know where various shipments of contraband was going and that involved getting close to some shady characters.

The HR and finance guys in the various countries were upstanding citizens for the most part (myself included) and whenever a relative newbie found out about what was going on there was usually some shock and awe but never anything in the direction of "let's not do business with these guys 'cuz they're bad". And that includes private conversations under the influence of alcohol, not just official statements.

You could say the tobacco industry is shady itself and attracts shadier characters than average, but above a certain level everyone's resume had all sorts of "legitimate" industries on them as well. I've never heard of a case where getting a job in another industry was ever made more difficult by having a tobacco company on your CV as opposed to, say, the coffee or chocolate industries.

My experience in the company was an eye-opening experience to say the least and it taught me a lot about human nature. It would be nice if it were different, though, and violence (or threat thereof) could somehow be taken out of the equation (or reduced substantially) but I don't see it happening in the next 10 generations at least.