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Short answer: Yes
Long Answer: Good lord. Yes, it would be something a bad person would do.
In effect, any gains you make will be blood money. Have fun with that on your conscience.
Yes
Yes. Doing so makes you a hypocrite. Don’t worry through, there’s no shortage of hypocrisy in America. It’s practically a requirement to be at least unwittingly hypocritical. Just by drinking Coke or tipping a waiter you’re contributing to a broken system designed to exploit people for maximum profit.
But here’s the rub. You can’t, in any practical sense, escape that crap, however, you can choose to not deliberately contribute to stuff outside your immediate wheelhouse. It’s one thing to buy a chocolate bar out of a vending machine, but investing in Nestle? That’s a choice, and one you could have easily skipped. You could skip the candy too, but it’s very, very hard (and impractical) to refuse every corporate product ever. Everything, from the materials in your electronics to your mortgage company, to most food from lettuce to frozen chicken, exploits people. But you don’t have to voluntarily make the problem worse.
And on the sliding scale of morality, investing in slavery - in this case the prison industrial complex is just greed and indifference to the cost in human suffering. Seriously research it, slavery in all but name has been part of the plan since the Reconstruction era after the Civil War. We never had a justice system; we have a punishment system that hungers for the labor of the downtrodden, especially of minorities.
So if you want to at least try and be a better person, and investing is something you want to do, look into the companies you’re investing in. See what their executives are paid compared to their workers here and abroad. There are companies that you can ethically justify investing in - small companies, co-ops, credit unions, pro-union companies, companies actually trying to solve problems or make the world better, like solar manufacturing, etc.
If you want to invest in human suffering, then you’re going to have to make peace with being a bad person and being judged for it. I’d advise at least trying not to. It’s a hopeless battle, but fighting honorably is its own justification.
There are not enough hundred dollar bills in the world to wipe off the stench of being branded a doody-head by the fediverse.
Thank you for your well thought out response to what might otherwise be dismissed as a trolling attempt.
Yes. Bad.
Yes
Fuck it, imma say it. Some questions are hella stupid
Needed to be said. I honestly thought I was in Onion territory at first…
Nope. Name a company or even an investment that isn’t evil. Would you want to invest in it? If you tried to avoid all of them it would be a very difficult life.
“listen. I don’t WANT Hitler to commit mass genocide. But I am going to fund the company of the gas chambers he plans to use. Because I benefit from it”.
It’s not a one to one comparison but um. Yeah.
Buying stock is not funding the company though unless the company is issuing new stock. The company already took the cash during the IPO. The only thing buying shares does is affect the price. So it will make some evil shit stain who is the founder of the company wealthier.
It’s a bit more nuanced. Buying the stock increases the stock price which makes issuing stock a better deal for the company in case they want to expand operations. It also makes stock buybacks less likely.
So if they issue stock OP is indirectly funding the company. If OP prevented a buyback and the money went into investments such as a new prison OP has an different effect. Otherwise there’s no effect.
I was coming to say that also.
The stock market is nothing more than gambling on the public (rich people) sentiment about how well that company is going to do. It’s similar to how there is gambling on who will win the presidency, and does not affect the outcomes.
Buying stock is not investment, the money that the company recieves comes from issuing the stock. Your money does not fund the evil things that the company does, unless you are paying for goods/services from that company. But, I have seen that stock price influences the decisions of leadership inside the company. Your individual action will not influence the stock price.
While I admit that I used to think trading was gambling I now know that while there is an element of gambling, there are a lot of measurable factors that make the “gambles” much more informed, even market psychology to some extent.
I would also ask yourself if this is beneficial at all.
Look at their historical prices. Investors have already bought into this.
Of course.
I think the private prison system is one of the worst institutions in the world. I think the reality of the stock market has no connection to capital reinvested into businesses vs shareholder dividends. Investments at this scale are not like giving a three person startup 2 million dollars. They’re not growing their businesses by putting it all into capex.
Are you an asshole for gambling on whether Trump will keep his word, using the systems in front of you? Dare I say it? No. You’re not.
The question of morality in investments is not absolute; it depends on how one frames responsibility and agency.
Markets are amoral tools. Financial markets operate independently of moral judgments. When individuals invest in an industry, they are not necessarily endorsing its practices but recognizing an opportunity within existing systems. One can argue that targeting an investment does not equate to creating or exacerbating the problems within that industry.
The existence of private prisons and deportation schemes reflects systemic issues, not individual investors. Policies and demand for incarceration stem from government choices and public sentiment. As such, targeting investors as “bad people” shifts focus away from the policymakers and institutions enabling these systems.
Some may justify these investments pragmatically: by securing financial stability, individuals can later support progressive causes, donate to charities, or fund organizations fighting for systemic change. For example, an investor might use the returns to support immigrant advocacy groups or lobby for prison reform.
There is algo “Separation of Investment and Values”. Not every decision must align with one’s ideological framework. People often compartmentalize their personal lives from their professional or financial strategies. A leftist could rationally engage in capitalism as a survival mechanism within an inescapable capitalist framework while still advocating for systemic change.
Many industries—tech, energy, or agriculture—have problematic practices, from exploitative labor to environmental harm. Singling out private prisons overlooks the broader complexity of investing in any sector. Most portfolios inadvertently include industries with ethical concerns, such as fossil fuels or fast fashion.
Defending this investment as not inherently immoral hinges on the premise that financial actions alone do not define someone’s character. Morality lies in how individuals balance their actions, mitigate harm, and contribute positively to society. However, ethical investments often require introspection and alignment with long-term values. While investing in private prison contractors can be defended on pragmatic or systemic grounds, it’s worth questioning whether the financial gain outweighs the potential ethical compromise.
Hmmm, are you saying workers are alienated from each other via the market? Social relations are mediated by commodities and money??
I swear I’ve heard this somewhere before…
Are you saying is not? When applied to investments, the abstraction becomes even more pronounced. As investors, individuals might focus on profit potential (commodities and returns) without directly engaging with or even acknowledging the human or social costs underlying those profits. The market acts as a buffer, depersonalizing the consequences and further alienating participants from the broader social implications of their actions.
So, yes, you’ve heard this before, and it’s a classic critique of how capitalism distorts and reframes human connections in terms of profit and exchange! Marx argues that under capitalism, commodities take on a life of their own, obscuring the labor and social relations that produced them. The true connections between people—worker to worker, worker to consumer, are hidden behind the veil of market exchange.
No, I agree wholeheartedly. My point was rather the abstraction of it just means it’s easier for the investment-minded human to justify their lack of direct connection to the mass jailing of innocents while actually being directly connected to the horrors of it. They feel like they’re not connected to it by the abstraction of the market.
I get what you’re saying, and I don’t disagree that the abstraction makes it easier for investors to detach themselves from the reality of what’s happening. But at the same time, isn’t that part of how all markets work? Investors don’t make the rules—they just operate within them. When it comes to private prisons, for example, the wrongful imprisonment of innocents or mass deportations aren’t supposed to be part of the “business model.” That’s a failure of the state, not the investor. In theory, these facilities exist to meet state demand for detention, which should be lawful and just (even if we know that’s not always the case).
And honestly, this kind of abstraction isn’t unique to private prisons. Look at almost any other industry:
Investing in food companies? You’re indirectly supporting things like worker exploitation, environmental damage, or factory farming (which involves a lot of animal suffering). Transportation? Cars, planes, and ships pollute the planet on a massive scale. Tech? There’s often exploitative labor behind those shiny gadgets, not to mention privacy violations or harmful social media algorithms. Fashion? Fast fashion profits off sweatshops and massive environmental waste.
If you zoom in on any one of these industries, the moral complications are everywhere. But most of us don’t expect investors to shoulder the blame for all of this—they’re operating within the system as it exists. To me, the real responsibility lies with governments and regulators to set the rules and hold these industries accountable. Investors aren’t actively making the decisions that harm people; they’re just responding to opportunities in the market.
At the end of the day, if we reject every investment tied to something morally gray, we’d have to swear off almost everything. I think that’s where the abstraction helps—it lets people focus on their role (whether as investors, consumers, or workers) without taking on all the guilt for how the system fails. Is it perfect? No, but it’s how the world works right now.
If you think you see an opportunity go ahead and invest and don’t feel ashamed. Many of the Hispanic immigrant communities that will adversely be affected by mass deportation had high levels of Trump support.
I say fuck it and make a buck. May those who voted for Trump get exactly what they voted for.
So first, you need to know that the definition of “genocide” is larger than you probably think.
The 1948 Genocide Convention defines genocide as any of five “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. The acts in question include killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group.
Emphasis mine.
Second, hastily-built private prisons constructed for the purpose of keeping a group that has committed no crime in one place long enough to “dispose of” them? They also have a technical term: a concentration camp. If they’re also performing work, they’re a labor camp.
So what Trump wants to do with Latiné folks is a form of genocide.
Third, there are multiple levels of supporting a genocide, from being a member of the society that created the out-group, all the way up through pulling people from that out-group from their homes. Somewhere in the middle of that list is “voluntarily providing aid to those committing the genocide.”
Fourth, each level of support bears a different culpability, and each individual within the levels bears a different culpability based on their knowledge and understanding of what’s happening, their intentional decision to participate or not, and the amount of protest they raise at the treatment of the out-group.
So, knowing all of this, where would you put such a decision?
