> The reason why risk departments all inevitably reinvent Maoism is because the only effective enforcement mechanism they have is to refuse service.

How is it Maoist to refuse service???

> This calculus falls apart for the government.

It really doesn't. The judicial process is expensive and jail time isn't at all proportional to the amount defrauded (especially not when there is no political appetite for locking up a disproportionately "racialized" set of culprits, never mind the facts); nor does it solve the problem of recovering those funds. Further, the projections on the amount of fraud uncovered make it seem rather likely that a high percentage of those responsible are going free.

> We don't need to repeatedly reinvestigate the same people for the same crime "just in case".

The entire point of the system you're calling "Risk Maoism" is that it does not involve reinvestigation; it involves a presumption that reinvestigation would be a waste of time.

My take is that we lack granular punishments.

Right now we have either some form of fine, and while this can be incredibly painful, usually is not, then we go straight to like multiyear prison sentences, with perhaps a few suspended sentences in between there.

I dunno, maybe a world where "you did a small bank fraud so now you have some kind of antifraud system attached to you" is genuinely worse than the one we live in now, but the idea of being able to target more specific aspects of someone rather than just prison/not prison seems interesting.

I guess we have stuff like "not allowed to use a computer for 5 years" (thanks hackers movie!), dunno how effective or practical that is.