Moonscape
How do you punish a person who feels no remorse? Along the same lines, what is a suitable punishment for those who have driven the world to financial ruin? What retribution awaits the architects of our disaster?
Abject poverty.
The rest of their lives spent in squalor, stewing weevil-infested maize meal on a rudimentary charcoal cooker, sleeping under a tattered mosquito net on a mat covering a dirt floor, sparingly using toxic bug spray to keep the cockroaches out. Ideally there would be some poetic justice in the choice of under-developed country in which they’d be deposited - a nation riven by resource wars fueled by first-world demand that they helped drive, or perhaps a state crippled by arbitrary debts and structural-adjustment loans (though perhaps that is a net cast too wide for any satisfying irony).
What distinguishes this punishment from simple revenge is that its “victims” would have as much freedom as most members of the society in which they find themselves. In some cases their freedom would be greater: if they caught malaria, diarrhea, or some other disease, they would be given medicine without charge. In other cases, it would be less. Specifically, they would not be allowed any income greater than the what the majority of that country’s extreme poor take in: $1-2 a day - though this would be provided for them if they could not find work.
What’s more, their income would rise with that of the poorest billion. Not that they would have any say in the matter (the poor never do - and criminals have even less), but if a decent standard of living became universal, it would be not be denied to the indicted.
Is this unfair? Is it too lenient?
(A similar question is asked in the Propagandhi song “Iteration” - scroll to the bottom at the link for the lyrics. I think they do a better job of answering it than I did here.)