Okay but seriously, vigilante violence without accountability is genuinely a bad thing. It is infinitely preferable to have a properly functioning justice system through which people can and would prefer to have their grievances addressed.
What is so much worse than vigilante violence without accountability is systemic violence without accountability. The most prolific vigilante in the world, hell the most prolific serial killer in the world, could not kill as many people per day as the CEO of United Healthcare is responsible for.
Because UHC has 157,000,000 "customers". I put customers in quotes because I am technically a UHC customer through my employer, but this is not a decision I have any say in or literally any alternative options to. The US mortality rate is about 257 out of 100,000 people per year. The average mortality rate in OECD nations (when people talk about "first world" nation statistics this is often what they mean) is 215 out of 100,000. And about 90% of deaths are due to medical issues as opposed to accidents. (Speaking of which, did you know more than 10% of deaths these days are from covid? Fucking hells.)
Now if you mutiply by 0.9 and subtract the OECD average from the United States average and, that very roughly gets you the proportion of deaths in the United States due to medical differences between the United States and other first world countries. If you multiply that by the number of UHC customers, you get about 60,000 people dying of preventable causes a year.
60,000 totally preventable deaths a year
Now the existence of United Healthcare is not the only difference at play here, there are poverty differences, exercise differences, diet differences, sleep differences. But studies are pretty unanimous that the strongest controlling factor for health is not exercise or diet or even sleep, it's quality of and access to healthcare. Even insofar as poverty controls for health, that's mostly as a determining factor of stress, diet, sleep, and *healthcare access*. So we might generouslh say that UHC is responsible for only half of those deaths. 30,000 people a year.
If even 1% of that is the CEO's personal fault, he killed about a person a day for profit.
That's not even getting into those impoverished and left destitute. If we had a justice system which treated violence appropriately, which had consequences for the murder of one's fellow human for personal reasons, the CEO of UHC would have been tried at the Hague and hanged until dead.
And the excuse that he was only acting as shareholder pressure dictates? That's just the "I was only following orders" excuse except somehow even thinner. Because wcan recognize that a military officer under direct orders from high command has a moral duty to not comply with crimes against humanity, and that they can be executed for such crimes regardless. And the idea that a company executive who took a voluntary position, making decisions about how to benefit shareholders economically, explicitly for personal profit, is somehow less responsible for the death they cause than a military officer in war is just absurd.
The sheer scale of injustice here is difficult to even imagine. Every day that these health insurance executives go without being tried at the Hague is an astonishing affront to justice.
So when somebody says that vigilante violence is bad, and that it would be bad if the CEO's killer got away? Forgive me if I just don't take it that seriously. Unless they've been advocating every day for the criminal justice system to see the executives of every private health care company in the United States brought to justice, I think maybe they're concern isn't actually about appropriate societally stabilizing justice for violence. I think it's maybe just a desire for things to feel stable and normal and not like a powder keg about to explode.
But let's be honest. If a powder keg is about to explode? It's because of a lack of justice for systemic violence, not vigilante violence.
