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Sean Malone: The idea that all the American companies should stop operating in Russia in order to stop Putin is absurd and might be dangerously counter productive as far as I can tell.Bastiat may not have said it, but a commonly attributed quote is apt:"When goods don't cross borders, armies will."In this case, we already have armies crossing borders and we need that to stop as quickly as possible.Some friends of mine have suggested that government sanctions and private individuals deliberately causing Russian people widespread pain through private boycotts will put pressure on Putin to end his attack on Ukraine. I've been told that it might even encourage Russians to remove him from power.These have always been the arguments for sanctions, but where is the evidence of this?At what point has state-enforced sanctions and private actors intentionally hurting citizens of another country with economic ostracism ever resulted in those citizens blaming their ruler and deposing him, instead of blaming the external forces and rallying together in national solidarity?What examples could you point to where these kinds of policies actually led to a dictator losing power?Did sanctions end the Castro regime? Or Hugo Chavez'? What about Ali Khamenei's?Kim Jong-Un/Il/Sung?Bashar al-Assad? It seems to me that most likely, McDonald's and Coca-Cola and the dozens of other companies pulling out of Russian markets, degrading their people's standards of living and leaving millions without jobs, will push more people towards Putin's camp, not away from it.MasterCard and Visa have already been replaced by Chinese equivalents, which doesn't strike me as a very good development.I don't know that much about the history of this conflict, but I do know a thing or two about how most people behave and how they respond to different types of stimuli. If the rest of the world blames you for what your government is doing and seems to want to see you rendered poor and hopeless, you're not going to see any good intentions behind those actions. You're probably not going to thank the rest of the world for opening your eyes to the awful mess your country's leader is creating. In fact, you're far more likely to become more aligned with that leader if you feel attacked.He's the guy you already know, a member of your national tribe who shares a lot of your identity and culture, and he's promising a better tomorrow, after all!Why wouldn't you support him and join his cause instead of joining the side of the people who are taking everything away from you.Another observation I'd offer here is that dictators all over the world have gotten a lot of mileage out of blaming US/EU sanctions for their own countries' economic problems. They've done this for decades, and it works because there's actually a bit of truth to it, and it allows them to completely shift blame away from their own policy failures onto an outside force."Were it not for [US, NATO, EU, etc.] meddling , our plans would have worked!" Especially when you factor in propaganda, state-controlled media, and the automatic credibility people give their political leaders, I don't see how any of this is going to hurt Putin.More likely it will help him... And in the process, it's hurting hundreds of millions of innocent people who didn't have anything to do with what's happening.This does not seem like a good answer.