The committee couldn’t agree on what penalties their new court should impose. In the beginning, that didn’t matter.

This was the third Tributary to be held. The first was right after the uprising, and did not garner much attention. Donny had watched it. It was more like a lecture than an actual trial, because the accused were tried in absentia. The second had not gathered much more attention, until the deals were announced. By seizing property, including drilling platforms in the area under its government’s control, which extended from New Orleans out into the Gulf, the Tributary managed to extract substantial sums from the companies that owned the property. That had helped generate some funds—almost $20 million, which helped pay for much-needed solar cells and other infrastructure on the list. But it didn’t produce much of a sense of justice, let alone authentic reconciliation. And they soon ran out of property to seize inside their territory, and with it, the means to enforce their judgments.

Some argued they should drop the project entirely and focus on the more important work of proving their new way of living in the rewilded city. Donny suggested that they let private lawyers like him sue on behalf of the city, and take a chunk of the reward after they figured out how to collect it. But the more strident contingent said what they needed to do was rewild the court. “Give the law some real teeth.” So instead of seizing property, the Tributary decided to try seizing people.

It was the killer app they had been looking for.

Some were the usual suspects. CEOs, disaster capitalists, enforcers of dark patents. But the real genius, especially for a project whose précis was to achieve present-tense accountability for centuries of wrongdoing and destruction, was to go after mere shareholders. Owners who were not managers. The people who took the profits from the exploitation, even if their stakes were acquired through inheritance from dead ancestors. American law had long treated shareholders as immune from culpability for the acts of the companies they owned, so challenging that basic premise of the system was truly radical. And if the Tributary succeeded in making that stick, it would pull the thread on the sweater of the whole system.

If you want to end capitalism, make capitalists pay the real price of what they legally steal. Of the life value they take from the world, not just from people, on terms that are fundamentally devoid of equal exchange. A taking that does not give back in return, especially when the long-term costs are taken into account.

And if you want to make them pay for what they steal, steal them. Take their liberty away from them. Take their anonymity away from them, and put their gluttonous extravagances on public display.