Zap-ito, in Texaso, ergo sum.
I can get zapped in Texas, therefore I must be human.
And that is what a corporation is not. You might have
learned that a decade ago, when the documentary
with the unfortunate name 'the Corporation' showed how,
if a corporation were a human, it would be classed as a
sociopath and locked away.
By granting sociopathic corporations (i.e. most of them)
carte blanch, through limited liability, we are encouraging
them to take ridiculous risks
(was that a bank crisis I just seen?)
that the rest of the planet pays for, while they hoard any &all money gained, if they're successful.
As Aziz shows, historically, laws have demanded that
such people, people of business, be killed for doing
what all our banks are doing:
the Great Bangkster Gang Bang
Financialisation has killed off most of the great empires of the last
500 years, from Venice to Britain. And we're all just gonna let them
do it again, when we've got thousands of trained economists
who could roll up their sleeves and help us, but don't.
I present you, the Corporation, laid bare: zerohedge
Guest
Post: Are Corporations People?
Submitted
by Tyler Durden on 07/16/2012 21:38 -0400
Submitted
by John Aziz of Azizonomics
I
have always found something inherently creepy about Mitt Romney — indeed, in a
choice between Obama and Romney with a gun to my head, the gun looks like an
increasingly attractive proposition. Most puzzling is his defence of corporate
personhood:
Corporations are people, my friend…
Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to people
Do corporations breathe? Do they eat, sleep,
feel and think? Do they require housing? Do they have families? Or medical
care? Do they pay income tax? Do they have DNA? Eyes? Ears? Teeth? Has Texas ever executed one?
No.
Corporations are not people. Corporations are composed of people, and for a
very good reason. From Wikipedia:
Limited
liability is a concept whereby a person’s
financial liability is limited to a fixed sum, most commonly the value of a
person’s investment in a company or partnership with limited liability. In
other words, if a company with limited liability is sued, then the plaintiffs
are suing the company, not its owners or investors. A shareholder in a limited
company is not personally liable for any of the debts of the company, other
than for the value of their investment in that company.
Corporations
essentially exist to allow groups of people to act collectively, without taking personal responsibility
if the entire thing goes down like a lead balloon. Sure, if an employee of a
corporation behaves in a criminal manner, they are sometimes jailed. Yet
corporations — ever since the birth of the modern corporation through Standard
Oil — have created what is known as the agency problem. Corporations allow their owners to win, without the
possibility of deep losses. And what does this mean in terms of
responsibility? It means that things like the BP Oil spill are much, much more
likely. Because if you can’t get hurt,
you’re not going to exercise diligence in the same way you would if you
could get more hurt. This is why the juggernauts of global industry — the
titans of Wall Street in particular — blow
up so frequently and so violently. Corporations are firewalls, spinning mammoth profits through risky
bets, but allowing management and shareholders to hide behind them when their risky
behaviour comes home to roost. And what happens if the house falls down?
The creditors — or more frequently in recent years since we adopted this
perverse bailout culture, the taxpayer — take the hit. The philosopher Nassim
Nicholas Taleb wrote on his Facebook page:
Hammurabi’s code, ~3800 years ago, removed the agency problem as a
condition for transaction: “If a builder builds a house and the house collapses
and causes the death of the owner – the builder shall be put to death. If it
causes the death of the son of the owner , a son of that builder shall be put
to death.” Everything in past 100 years has been to shield managers from liabilities. Think of Fukushima.
Either
limited liability should be abolished —
corporations could still exist, but their owners and management are personally
responsible for any debts and destruction incurred — or their behaviour should
be taxed punitively to encourage individual and small business initiatives —
the real wealth creators, job creators and innovators — over large scale
destructo-juggernauts. At the very least, we should completely stop bailing
them out when they blow up. That’s responsibility.
Corporations are certainly not free
market entities.
Their very reason for existence — limited liability — is created through government fiat. Capitalism and markets
existed long before the creation of limited liability, and surely will exist
for a long time after its demise.
