Corporate Entities vs Real People

[Cramulus]

I've already flipped out about this topic in the past.

But in brief --

Our legal system has extended the same rights enjoyed by flesh-and-blood humans to legal fictions. Corporate entities have infinitely more resources and few of the same limitations as humans. This means that in most battles of individuals vs corporations, the corporation is going to win. We have created this things, and now they are our masters.

So I posit that individuals should have tons of rights.
but corporate persons should not.



Is there already a name for this political ideology?

what are the ramifications and implications of this?

[Reginald Ret]

idea:
stop taxing people and start taxing fictional entities instead.
make a law saying that people can't hire people, you need to create a fictional entity to do that.
then you just need to change a few names and you can keep the income tax system.
except that it will now be the human resources expenditure tax.

It's even good for the govt, because then noone will vote against raising taxes, since they wont feel it directly.

[Jasper]

I am liberal enough to say that sure, corporations can have human rights.  WITH the condition that they  also have human vulnerabilities.  Like death.  And prison.  And 5150's.

Our culture has a story.  Something inhuman tries to become human.  In succeeding, it finds out how terrible it is, and learns a lesson.

That's what I want to happen.

[Doktor Howl]

I am liberal enough to say that sure, corporations can have human rights.  WITH the condition that they  also have human vulnerabilities.  Like death.  And prison.  And 5150's.

Our culture has a story.  Something inhuman tries to become human.  In succeeding, it finds out how terrible it is, and learns a lesson.

That's what I want to happen.

Pinocchio?

[Jasper]

It has a lot of variations, as a central theme.

Anyway, what I'm trying to claim is that it's free to have all the rights I do, as long as there's something there to kill, to imprison, to attack.

[Doktor Howl]

It has a lot of variations, as a central theme.

Anyway, what I'm trying to claim is that it's free to have all the rights I do, as long as there's something there to kill, to imprison, to attack.

To draft into the military.
To require jury duty of.
To hold, as a complete entity, responsible for actions.

[Jasper]

YES.

If that can't be arranged, I'll fall back on complete resistance to the idea in any form.

[Jasper]

To answer the OP though, from a realistic POV it's probably just called anticorporatism.  Opposition to something that would benefit a corporation. 

The political side of it is (to me) less interesting than the philosophical/ethical ramifications.

Should things that aren't living human beings have rights?  It depends on why things get rights at all.

Things/people get rights in this country because...?

I don't know, honestly.  I know that we purport to have ideals nad principles that we call self-evident and they do seem to be so, but those justifications don't seem to strike at the heart of why some peoplethings get rights, and some get less, or none.

Perhaps someone else can add?

[Rumckle]

It's even good for the govt, because then noone will vote against raising taxes, since they wont feel it directly.

I doubt that.

[Golden Applesauce]

A corporation isn't even a thing.  It's an abstract legal/economic concept that people use as a tool to organize themselves.  The idea of giving a legal concept rights is absurd because a legal concept isn't an agent (in the technical sense of an entity which initiates action.)  Giving an organizational principle 'rights' is incoherent.  It doesn't make sense to say that an idea has the right to perform an action because ideas can't act in the first place.  It can't have freedom of speech - even in principle - because it can't think, much less speak.

A corporation is a charter granted by a government to a group of people, which is to say that it is an agreement between a government and a group of citizens ('shareholders.')  The government agrees not to hold the shareholders personally responsible for debts incurred by the collective of shareholders, and the shareholders agree to follow the various regulations the government chooses to impose on corporations (such as additional corporate income taxes.)  The main idea is that this organizational scheme encourages investment, especially small investments, which improves the general efficiency of the economy.

The problem is that this organizational scheme brings out the worst in people.  The system of having shareholders gain money when the corporation makes money but not lose anything when the corporation breaks laws - to the point of causing the death of numerous people - unsurprisingly results in shareholders electing CEOs willing to do anything in the name of money.  On top of this, the belief that the corporation is a really existing thing in its own right leads people to think that they are not responsible for their own actions (although in fairness this is a problem with many hierarchical structures.)  Even the CEO is employed by "The Company," so it shouldn't be surprising when he does what The Company wants him to do even against his own reservations.  When the CEO decides to cut corners in safety to save money, it isn't really him deciding to do that.  The Company made the decision that profits were more important than lives and small oceans - he's just passing that information on to everybody else.  It isn't his fault if something goes terribly wrong; he didn't file the articles of incorporation to create this monstrosity.  Besides, the shareholders elected him because they thought he would bend the rules a little - it would be dishonest not to!

It's an organizational scheme which simultaneously creates Good Germans at every level and encourages people to elect a psychopath to run the thing.  Power corrupts, and power without culpability corrupts even faster.  So why do we allow such systems to continue existing after they've gone bad?

More than anything, the articles of incorporation that make the corporation in the first place need to come up for periodic renewal.  If the people feel that having a particular corporation does more harm than good, then they should decline to renew the charter and stop granting special legal privileges to a group of people who have demonstrated that they can't be trusted with it.

[Telarus]

Oh Goddess, so much of all of the above.

Corporations are NOT people.

[Cramulus]

I just find it curious that this POV doesn't already have an established place in politics somewhere. Is it because we're missing some really key part of the argument, like that if legal fictions didn't have the right to free speech, corporations would be paralyzed somehow and the economy would collapse?

It just seems so whack to me that if I were to protest, I dunno, minimum wage.. My employees would flip out. But I have a legal fiction to hide behind which means my responsibility has been displaced. I am not personally liable for the company's will. You can't be mad at me, it's the corporate DNA I'm executing.   ie "I was only following orders operant conditioning."




why is it that the opposite of Libertarian is Statist? I don't know any statists, but I do know a lot of people who don't think that both the government and corporations should ease back. Why aren't there any political movements which don't seek to trade one insidious form of control for another? I'm not an anarchist, I believe that there should be a government, and there should be corporations, I just wish I (as an individual) was on equal footing with the corps in terms of influencing law making, etc. And I wish the government would keep the corps in check while staying away from my civil liberties. Is that too much to ask?

[East Coast Hustle]

in short, yes.

[Triple Zero]

I am liberal enough to say that sure, corporations can have human rights.  WITH the condition that they  also have human vulnerabilities.  Like death.  And prison.  And 5150's.

Our culture has a story.  Something inhuman tries to become human.  In succeeding, it finds out how terrible it is, and learns a lesson.

That's what I want to happen.

Pinocchio?

The Golem, also Frankenstein in a way... it's a sort of archetype thing, I guess?

Anyway, I'm totally with Cram.

And SERIOUSLY. On the long term, we, as the Human Race need to put a stop to this, because obviously if corporations get accepted as actual living entities, and corporations are made up of us, what are we? Like red blood cells or mitochondria to much larger organisms, that's what. No, knowing our lovely Goddess, we'll end up being its intestinal flora, I bet. Anyway the point is that the larger organism doesn't care shit about the individuality of its parts, and will kill them without even a thought, cause that's the way its metabolism works.

[Jasper]

It kind of already works that way.  Sorry.