To Tom Lorenzo: when explicating "Lincoln and the Growth of Statism", don't forget Lincoln and the Growth of Corporate-Statism
I left the following comments recently at Thomas L. Lorenzo‘s December 15, 2010 Mises Daily post, The Great Centralizer: Lincoln and the Growth of Statism in America:
Tom, great post/precis of your book.
I do hope you’ll also take note in your lectures and further writings of how the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment (agreed to by southern states as a condition of ending the Reconstruction) was perverted by the railroads and then other corporations to further liberate shareholders from the control of the states, by preventing states in which they were foreign corporations from treating them differently from locally established (and locally-owned) corporations. (I’ve read that something like 95% of “Equal Protection” jurisprudence involves corporations, not actual persons.)
The result was further expansion :
– of corporate power,
– of the moral hazard they embody via the grant of limited liability of shareholders for injuries to third persons,
– of mass torts by corporations,
– of unions to balance the power of executives,
– of efforts by citizens to run to Washington to seek regulations to rein in corporate excesses,
– of the weakening of the states and the expansion of “Commerce Clause” and “General Welfare” doctrines and
– of the capture of the Federal government by corporate insiders.
More here:
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2010/02/06/corpspeak-on-the-dangers-of-corporations-and-of-the-supreme-court-quot-jefferson-was-right-quot.aspx
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=limited
Yours in striking at the root,
TT
January 6, 2011 at 6:07 am
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