It will be interesting to see what the fallout of the Volkswagen finagling will be. One certainty, I’ll need to drive my Jetta wagon into the dirt, because I’ll never get anything for it when I sell it. Not after all of this. But frankly, I prefer to drive my cars into the dirt.
And if precedent is a guide, I don’t expect any real consequences other than a fine which the shareholders end up paying while the culpable agents continue to rake in their riches or perhaps (at worst) take a golden parachute and then move on to the next opportunity.
Our culture has been infected by a strain of rabid libertarianism so complete that most of us are incapable of responding to claims that nothing of significance happened here, that no one was harmed, that everyone’s doing it, that in any event what do you want to do, bankrupt the company?
In that vein, I found The Moral Universe of the Corporate Killers to be a welcome relief from the usual rationalizations for corporate malfeasance. This was not a hack to their software. This was not a bug. It was not some fluke. This was a consciously designed component whose only purpose was to allow VW clean diesels to get away with emitting toxic levels of pollutants that kill.
And holy cow, check out the parallels in this clip of Orson Wells playing Harry Lime in The Third Man (hat tip: this comment in that essay):
Don’t be melodramatic. Look down there. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money? Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare…?