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Keyword: ‘sociopath’

The sociopathy of not wanting to see the structural roots of “sociopathic” business behavior

April 19th, 2014 No comments

[cross-posted from comments at WBOS FB]

A colloquitor believes business successes are driven by “betrayal, and ruthless sociopathy. That is how it works, and that surprisingly is what seems to lead to dominance and success in markets – or is believed to lead to dominance and success in markets.”

I think the sociopathy you speak of is a very real problem, but it is one we see mainly where, thanks to the Govt interventions that have made shareholders powerless, there is no effective external check on management. Did you see my post on “drone corporations” (half of the Fortune 500)?

https://www.facebook.com/groups/webuildoursociety/permalink/510602852376936/?stream_ref=2

The progressive approach differs from mine/the real libertarian one largely in that progressives still naively believe that more centralization (more power to a few) is the best way to fight problems produced by centralization. Rather, we must fight the DYNAMIC of centralization — roll back Govt-enabled risk socialization (limited liability of shareholders, deposit insurance and “protection” of public shareholders) and make use creative destruction to bring down the dinosaurs/Frankensteins.

Yes, the NAME of “libertarianism” has been used to magnify and justify corporate power, and attack and disempower ordinary working people, but not real libertarianism itself, which fights against the dynamic of the growth and capture of a central state that both parties have fed.

“Arn’t you being a bit monotonic in your explanations here? Everything wrong with biz is an external factor that depends on the government and only on the government? Isn’t it possible there could be other sources of malfunction as well? If the government has done stuff surely it is in response to the encouragement of the sociopaths and the delinquence of the supposedly controlling shareholders? And you must be aware that appointing sociopathic upper executives has often increased the shareprice, suggesting that shareholders approve in general, or even demand sociopathy? just as they approve sacking ordinary workers or cutting their wages? Sociopathy could be a feature encouraged by capitalism and free markets – competition, wiping out the opposition, exploiting the workers, and profit are the key values – which could be easily embraced by sociopaths.”

I may seem monotonic because I am looking at core dynamics of#MoralHazard, risk socialization, govt “capture”, corruption and theft.

On share prices and sociopathy, can I get you to look at these posts on drone corporations’ negative behavior invited by unaccountability and government? [Did you know that cronyism in general means LOWER economic performance?]

https://www.facebook.com/tokyotomsr/posts/510602852376936
http://tokyotom.freecapitalists.org/?s=sociopath
http://tokyotom.freecapitalists.org/?s=frankenstein
http://tokyotom.freecapitalists.org/?s=hayek+moral+market

See Roderick Long here: http://c4ss.org/content/11146, and my earlier post on Robert Nisbethttp://reason.com/…/1984/10/01/cloaking-the-states-dagger.

Libertarianism/anarchism/mutualism/true conservatism would actually bring government and business both down to levels that could be managed by people in the communities that commons-guru #Ostrom spoke of:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/art…/hometown-hero/
http://www.newrepublic.com/…/remembering-alienation…
http://www.kirkcenter.org/…/robert-nisbet-and-the-idea…/

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Sociopaths-R-Us? Here’s someone’s interesting thought experiment: "What If BP Were A Human Being?"

May 17th, 2010 No comments

Further to my preceding BP posts regarding the gaps between (i) Austrian insistence that we focus on individual rights and plan formation and (ii) the penchant of some (many!) libertarians to support corporations while bashing citizens groups which are unhappy with the impacts of corporate actions on others, I stumbled across the above-captioned essay by Bruce Dixon, Editor of The Black Commentator (May 12, 2010, AlterNet).

I here are some liberal quotes (no pun intended; emphasis added):

If BP were a person it would be a career criminal, a pathological liar and an international serial killer with a rap sheet several times the size of the Chicago Yellow Pages.

The third largest oil company in the world, BP was born in 1909 as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, and was partly owned by the British government. Its headquarters offices are in the UK.. So if it were a flesh and blood person, far and away the wealthiest person on earth, and a British subject. Assuming that our imaginary human BP got into the oil business at the youthful age of say, 20, and stayed at it for just over a century, BP the human being would be closing in on his 121st birthday. Damned few of us will see triple digits, and none of us that reach even our 60s and 70s retain the level of energy, or often of interest that we possessed only a couple decades before. A normal 120 year old human will have more than a few ailments and bodily systems on the brink of failure. But not our human BP. If BP were a person, it would be immensely, almost inconceivably wealthy AND perhaps immortal. ….Among flesh and blood humans, there are no precise analogs to what corporations do when they buy and sell each other. The acts of matrimony and cannibalism perhaps comes closest, with consenting or non-consenting spouses and/or victims, along with assumption of the spouse and/or victim’s assets. Among humans, marriage is a reason to change one’s name too. Another reason to change one’s name is simply to escape one’s old record and reputation. Among humans, that’s called assuming an alias. So our immortal, immensely wealthy human BP may have been married several times, perhaps several times at once, could be a cannibal, albeit with sometimes willing victims, and operates under several aliases.

You don’t have to look too long and hard to understand why a flesh and blood BP would need aliases. The objective of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company was to monopolize the rich oil resources of what is now Iran. Among the many illegal acts it committed toward that end was a £5,000 bribe to future British PM Winston Churchill back in 1923 to lobby for its interests A secular nationalist and democratically elected Iranian government kicked BP out in the early 1950s. BP turned its lobbying to Washington DC, and in 1953, helped persuade the U.S. to overthrow the Democratic Iranian government and installed its puppet, the Shah, popularly known as the Crowned Cannibal. The Shah, in the course of killing millions and stealing billions, invited BP back, and it stayed until 1979, when the Shah was overthrown.

In a century of doing business, BP has been implicated in bribery of public officials, grand theft, fomenting unjust wars, of murder, torture, plunder, environmental destruction, and money laundering in and between scores of countries on every continent except Antarctica. If BP were a person it would be a career criminal, a pathological liar and an international serial killer with a rap sheet several times the size of the Chicago Yellow Pages.

Given his (we’re reasonably sure a human BP would not be a woman) global reach and proclivity to corrupt public officials around the world, and past record, BP the human being would be a flight risk. It would be indicted for murder, or at least negligent homicide in the deaths of the last eleven oil workers to die when its rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. U.S. law doesn’t have death penalties for corporations, but the federal government, and most or all of the first wave of Gulf Coast states where the oil slick will wash up do. We’re talking Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas.

The assets of corporations are protected against lawsuits of all kinds. BP and other oil industry giants long ago paid for the insertion of provisions into the U.S. federal code that limit their liability in the case of oil spills to a mere $75 million dollars. But there are no limits on the liability that individually held wealth can occur. A human BP, even though 120 years old and immensely wealthy, could see all his assets around the world frozen, would be imprisoned without bail, and might be on trial for his life.

But of course the real BP is a corporation, and death penalties, like laws in general are for humans, not corporations.

In the single instance of the blown rig at Deepwater Horizon, BP had a deal with the U.S. federal government that excused it from paying any royalties, and subcontracted the building and operation of the rig to Halliburton, Cameron and other corporations. If they too were human beings like our hypothetical human BP, we could add “conspiracy to commit” and “conspiracy to conceal” in front of all the previously mentioned offenses, and the lot of them along with many of their favorite government officials could be rounded up.

When it suits their purposes, employees and mouthpieces of various transnational firms hasten to assure us that “corporations are people too.” In a sense this is certainly true. Despite what some bible thumping fundamentalists will tell you, corporations were not ordained by the Almighty. Corporations are legal fictions. They are artificial shields under which we agree to allow a handful of extremely wealthy people to rule over the rest us, and plunder the planet and its people at will, just as centuries ago most of the humans who mattered agreed that kings, queens and nobly born, the “people of quality” had the god given right to ride roughshod over humanity.

Ultimately, people woke up, rose up, and revoked those privileges. How long will it be before we revoke the lawless privileges of corporations, before we limit their immunity, curtail their immortality, and rein in their immorality?. How long can we, and the planet on which we depend for life itself, wait? Is there every a line that cannot be crossed? Where is it? What will it take?

Apart from Mr. Dixon’s questions, it seems to me one must ask – does it make any difference, either to the broader statist environment that we find ourselves, or to the behavior of BP, that BP is a corporation that is granted unlimited life and whose shareholders are excluded from any personal liability for corporate acts? I think that it undeniably matters, and quite deeply.

Just as libertarian and other commentators have suggested that we need to insist that firms that engage in the banking business be partnerships with unlimited liability in order to control the moral hazard engendered by the current system, so too should libertarians insist on restoring personal responsibility and ending corporate limited liability. If we do so, we will certainly see much greater efforts by those who own and/or manage business enterprises to control risks and behave responsibly – which will take pressure off of spiralling calls for corrupt and inept governments to “do something”!

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Speech and Sociopaths: Does it make sense to collapse, for Constitutional and legal purposes, the distinctions between human beings and corporate "persons"?

February 11th, 2010 No comments

Further to my preceding posts on corporate “free speech”, let me copy here for those interested some parts of a post by legal blogger/law prof Kimberly Hauser, and excerpts of the comment thread (emphasis added).

Says Hauser:

Justice Kennedy stated in the majority opinion: “If the First
Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing
citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in free
speech.”  Hold on, Emily Litella, since when is a corporation an
“association of citizens.”  The last time I checked, they were
state-chartered entities organized for the purpose of operating a
business, making a profit, and sheltering the organizers of the
business from personal liability.  I don’t think anyone would mistake
one for an “associations of citizens.” 
This decision is a travesty on
a number of levels, but as I discussed with my classes today,
corporations are not humansThomas Jefferson stated: “A bill of
rights is what the people are entitled to against
every government on earth, .  .  .”  These rights are human rights,
essential to our type of government.  They should not be cheapened by
their extension to corporations. 
(I do understand that corporations
have been given “rights” over the years by the Supreme Court, starting
with Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company.  I just don’t agree with that line of decisions.  And while I agree with Stevens’s Dissent in Citizens, I don’t agree with his adherence to the “corporations are people too” position.)

From the comment thread:

… The root of the problem is that corporations are divorced from their
owners, who have been given a grant of limited liability for the risks
they shift to society, a cloak of anonymity by which they can behave
irresponsibility and seek favors from government, as well as unlimited
lives and deep pockets to make persistent efforts to corrupt.


on February 7, 2010 at 4:27 am | Lampie The Clown

… You mentioned the Santa Clara case as the start of
corporate personhood, without mentioning that it was sleight of hand
and not a real ruling on the subject. That’s exactly what the clerk was
counting on, and why it worked. Just thought I’d tell the rest of the
story.

Actually, long before the Santa Clara case, the legal fiction of
corporations as people was established to include five legal rights—the
right to a common treasury or chest (including the right to own
property), the right to a corporate seal (i.e., the right to make and
sign contracts), the right to sue and be sued (to enforce contracts),
the right to hire agents (employees) and the right to make by-laws
(self-governance). They were given the rights they needed to do the
only thing they were designed to do. Conduct business.

They are amoral, profits and self interest as highest priority are
mandated by law to be part of their design, and they have limited
liability. This gives them the “personality” of a sociopath, and makes
them unsuited by design to using free speech responsibly.

With the current design, the only solution I can think of is to have
Asimov’s “three laws of robotics” made part of all corporate charters. ….

 

One commenter defended the Court with a straight face:

A
Corporation IS an “association of citizens”– those citizens are the
shareholders, i.e., owners of said corporation, who associate ever so
often (annual meetings, and other special occasions)
….

And as for objections to “corporate personhood”, as a person is
created by human parents and grows in a mother’s womb, so too is a
corporation. It is created by the (human) people who sign its original
charter, and the “womb” that allows the corporation to be ‘born’ is
that of the [government] agency that grants corporate charters. The difference
between the two different types of “births” are, in my opinion,
negligible.

(Eventually, human embryos won’t have to be implanted into a person
in order to be born– so the “birth from a human” objection will cease
to have merit.)

As for Lampie’s argument that corporations have “the personality of
a ’sociopath’, (which) makes them unsuited by design to using free
speech responsibly”, this argument that discriminates against REAL
sociopaths (who as far as I know, STILL have their free speech rights
unencumbered by the SCOTUS decision or any comments you’d make to the
contrary). Sociopaths have rights, too!

My sense of humor is a bit underdeveloped, so at first I ignored the “sociopath” assertion and penned a straight response regarding the “association” assertion:

Shawn, several points:

while real people do associate to form a corporation, a corporation
remains a legal fiction created by governments, not the people
“associating” with it. It is legally separate and distinct from them and their
ownership right is considered property.

– Since a corporation is peoples’ property, those [people who own it] have
Constitutional rights to make sure their property is not unjustly or
without due process taken by government.

Other forms of property, like human slaves, were not considered
citizens and did not have Constitutional rights, including a right to
speak.
If slaves and inanimate things couldn’t/can’t speak for Constitutional
purposes, neither does it make any sense to argue that corporations – as
opposed to the people in them – can “speak” under the First Amendment.

– Further, it is crystal-clear that the Founding Fathers hated
corporations, and the ability of states to closely restrict them and to
impose conditions on the privileges and rights they received was
uncontested. It is a radical and profoundly non-originalistic step to
conclude, as the Roberts/Scalia court did, that the Founding Fathers
intended [in the Bill of Rights] to provide Constitutional speech rights to corporations.

Then, getting the joke about sociopaths, I couldn’t resist making a didactic point:

Shawn,
presumably your comment is wholly tongue-in-cheek, but let me note that
we hunt down and lock away (and even execute) sociopaths – thus
depriving them not merely of their speech, but of their ability to harm
us and even their existence in some cases.

If corporations are by nature sociopathic, then we by all means ought to do the same.

Note that we don’t need to lock up corporations; we can find various
ways to change their nature, control their bad behavior and limit their
ability to hurt us – the simplest way, of course, would be to simply
eliminate the limited liability of their shareholders, who would then
have every incentive to control what their [not-so-]little Frankensteins do.

Fun with Kevin Gutzman, or, Does Citizens United apply to state limitations on what “speech” their corporations can engage in?

November 6th, 2014 No comments

Historian and Constitutional scholar Kevin Guzman posted a comment on his Facebook wall on the Citizens United decision that I took a disliking to.

Here is his September 6, 2014 post and my responses (to him and his other commenters):

There’s a popular meme that “Corporations aren’t people.” The aim is to repeal the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United that Congress cannot under the Speech and Press Clauses of the First Amendment limit political advertising so stringently as it had been under the McCain-Feingold Act. The point of the meme is that only people are entitled to constitutional protections, and so Congress can do whatever it wants to corporations. Let’s follow the implications of the claim that “Corporations aren’t people.”

So you’re going to deny corporations constitutional rights. Does that mean the government will be able to search corporations’ property without warrants? Take their property without trial? Try them without counsel? Censor their publications? Punish them under ex post facto laws? House soldiers in their property during peacetime? Force them to pay to support churches?

At least as early as Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819), the Supreme Court recognized that corporations do indeed have rights of individuals. To say that they didn’t would mean empowering government in new and dangerous ways. Besides, we all know that shareholders–corporations–are people. They’re not hamsters. They’re not sandwiches. They’re not automobiles. They’re people.

 

September 7 at 1:24am

Tokyo Tom Kevin, this is an interesting an important topic, which hasn’t been set up very well. 

First, I think you missed the gist of the Dartmouth case, which essentially said that NH couldn’t alter Dartmouth’s charter (which had been granted by the English Crown), because the corporate charter was a form of private contract that was protected from “impairment” by states under the Constitution. The case was brought by the Trustees of Dartmouth, and didn’t particularly “recognize that corporations do indeed have rights of individuals.” States responded by reserving greater powers when they create corporations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_College_v._Woodward
http://www.oyez.org/cases/1792-1850/1818/1818_0
http://www.americanbar.org/…/students_in…/dartmouth.html

 

September 7 at 1:32am

Tokyo Tom Hopefully, we’re all clear on the fact that corporations are created by governments, were traditionally considered as forms of contracts and property rights, and have special powers, rights and characteristics provided by state legislatures that render them quite different from real, live human beings?

Unfortunately, many on the Left and Right are confused about the origin, history and nature of corporations. As I said to some progressives:

“Sadly, it seems that most if not all of the progressives here want to deny what cannot be denied: that corporations exist only because they are made by acts of legislative power of Governments. They also want to deny that the special characteristics that Govt give to “corporations” are the very attributes that lead to harms to others/social ills that continually fuel more regulation of corporations by governments.

“It’s hard to discern why they have these views–perhaps, because they are so ingrained in seeing Govt as their sole savior in fighting against corporate Frankensteins–but they are clearly incorrect, as a legal and historical matter.
Be that as it may, as a matter of understanding and attacking the roots of our problems, it behooves progressives to investigate and understand how government and corporations shape the incentives and influence the behavior of the people who find themselves within them.

“Not only do corporations exist only because of Govt, but it is clear that the reasons why corporations play such negative roles in society and have corrupted Govt are their state-granted characteristics that would NOT exist in a “free market”. Sole proprietorships, partnerships, associations and co-operatives do NOT have#LimitedLiability, unlimited lives, unlimited purposes, and the businesses do not have legal entity status different from the owners.

http://tokyotom.freecapitalists.org/…/corporations…

 

September 7 at 1:47am

Tokyo Tom Corporations have continued to find the Federal government and Supreme Court their friend in escaping control by the states that created them; see this pre-Citizens United post about the perversion of the anti-discrimination (due process/equal protection) provisions of the 14th Amendment (that used “persons” to protect freed slaves and unnaturalized Chinese) to require various states to treat corporations made in other states the same as their own corporations:

http://tokyotom.freecapitalists.org/…/corpspeak…/

 

September 7 at 1:51am

Tokyo Tom Karl Pope’s thoughts after Citizens United are largely spot on, and explain the drive that Sen. Colburn is now sponsoring to convene a Constitutional Convention to consider amendments:

http://tokyotom.freecapitalists.org/…/carl-pope-sierra…/

 

  • Kevin Gutzman It’s impossible to remove money from politics. If you deny individuals the right to buy political ads, you’ve effectively elevated owners of media corporations to the status of Elite Class, as only they will be able to say what they want. On the other hand, the Tenth Amendment reserves power to regulate elections to the states; if they want to ban donations from out-of-state interests or individuals, they should be allowed to do so. Score another negative result for the Incorporation Doctrine.
  • Kevin Gutzman I think that all federal campaign regulation is unconstitutional, as nothing in the Constitution empowers Congress to regulate anything other than the “time, place, and manner” of elections. At the federal level, there’s no reason not to have a sunshine law requiring disclosure of all donations.
  • Tokyo Tom Good point, Savana — states can and should be able to condition any corporate license on things that the corporation cannot do in its own name, such as lobbying. 
    Such a conditioning of the grant of corporate charter would be Consitutional, and would NOT deprive any individual of his own rights to lobby (or to combine with other employees to do so).If we want to get crony capitalism and the runaway regulatory state under control, we should simply stop granting #LtdLiability to corporate shareholders, and restore shareholder responsibility to monitor risk management by executives and managers.

    http://tokyotom.freecapitalists.org/…/immodest…/

    Tokyo Tom Kevin, I didn’t realize that “deny[ing] individuals the right to buy political ads” was the premise here, but denying the “right” of state-made entities to buy political ads, make contributions etc.
    • Tokyo Tom From my own Constitutional analysis, corporations, as artificial things, don’t “speak” at all (just as a printing press doesn’t speak either); people speak. Unfortunately, corporations (including media corporations) HAVE become ways for people to mask WHO is speaking. I think it perfectly acceptable under state corporation law and under the 1st Ad to constrain certain types of corporate “speech”.

    • Kevin Gutzman Big money wins? Big money often loses. Google “Michael Huffington” or “Clayton Williams” and see what you find. Let people know who is doing the contributing.
      Note: I agree with Savana that foreign contributions should be illegal. In theory, they already are, although Bill Clinton took advantage of them, (in)famously.
    • Kevin Gutzman The idea that I should be forced to contribute to Hillary2016! thrills me about as much as being forced to help fund the Westboro Baptist Church.
      Tokyo Tom SCOTUS has the First Amendment wrong -this was intended to bind tie Feds, at a time when corporations were profoundly despised and considered property of their shareholders, with rights only grudgingly granted by states.
      Property doesn’t “speak,” even as every single shareholder and employee retains full personal speech rights.
      Kevin Gutzman “Groups of people are not people.” — ISIS
      Tokyo Tom Mark, without corporations, are people UNABLE to associate to conduct business together?
      Corporations are creations of governments. People are not. Nor are voluntary associations of people, as businesses/partnerships, co-ops, unions or churches.
      Tokyo Tom ISIS? “of course a few less than enlightened people are not seeing the distinction between an inactive band of musicians and a band of terrorists involved in current world affairs.”
    Kevin Gutzman Right, they’re sheep.
    Special sheep with all the constitutional rights of individuals that they are capable of exercising–as I enumerated in my original post. The only one they don’t have is, “coincidentally,” the one the Democratic Party doesn’t want them to have.
    From Dred Scott to present, that’s the way Democratic Party “constitutionalism” works.
    Tokyo Tom “Of course corporations have the same rights as people. A corporation is not a tangible thing. It is an abstract term describing a group of organized individuals/people.”Balderdash on a stick, that we are reminded of in the cases of BP and Fukushima. Show me any individuals without a government-made liability shield who could do the damage that corporations (and governments do). Where are the mass torts? The Superfund sites?

    Individuals, business partnerships and coops can all be kept in check (to a significantly greater degree) by others in the communities in which they live.

    http://tokyotom.freecapitalists.org/…/quot-biggest…/

    Kevin Gutzman Tokyo Tom, I got off at “Senator Joe Barton.”
    Tokyo Tom State-made corporations are the health of the massive regulatory state, which is likewise the health of the crony corporations. It’s a rachet, and racket.
    Are you a Bootlegger, or a Baptist?
    Tokyo Tom Let’s look more at BP as a “person”:|

    • Jim Hightower:
      “And now, its rap sheet grows almost daily. In fact, the Center for Public Integrity has revealed that the oil giant’s current catastrophic mess should come as no surprise, for it has a long and sorry record of causing calamities. In the last three years, the center says, an astonishing “97 percent of all flagrant violations found in the refining industry by government safety inspectors” came at BP facilities. These included 760 violations rated as “egregious” and “willful.” In contrast, the oil company with the second-worst record had only eight such citations.
      While its CEO, Tony Hayward, claims that its gulf blowout was simply a tragic accident that no one could’ve foreseen, internal corporate documents reveal that BP itself had been struggling for nearly a year with its inability to get this well under control. Also, it had been willfully violating its own safety policies and had flat out lied to regulators about its ability to cope with what’s delicately called a major “petroleum release” in the Gulf of Mexico.

      “What the hell did we do to deserve this?” Hayward asked shortly after his faulty well exploded. Excuse us, Tony, but you’re not the victim here — and this disaster is not the work of fate. Rather, the deadly gusher in the gulf is a direct product of BP’s reckless pursuit of profits. You waltzed around environmental protections, deliberately avoided installing relatively cheap safety equipment, and cavalierly lied about the likelihood of disaster and your ability to cope with it.

      “It wasn’t our accident,” the CEO later declared, as oil was spreading. Wow, Tony, in one four-word sentence, you told two lies. First, BP owns the well, and it is your mess. Second, the mess was not an “accident,” but the inevitable result of hubris and greed flowing straight from BP’s executive suite.
      “The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean,” Hayward told the media, trying to sidestep the fact that BP’s mess was fast becoming America’s worst oil calamity. Indeed, Tony coolly explained that the amount of oil spewing from the well “is tiny in relation to the total water volume.” This flabbergasting comment came only two weeks before it was revealed that the amount of gushing oil was 19 times more than BP had been claiming.
      Eleven oil workers are dead, thousands of Gulf Coast people have had their livelihoods devastated and unfathomable damage is being done to the gulf ecology. Imagine how the authorities would be treating the offender if BP were a person. It would’ve been put behind bars long ago — if not on death row.
      [link above, past the Joe Barton part]

      And here’s a couple of fun video clips riffing on the nature of the unaccountability of corporate/BP execs (not to mention the absentee shareholders, “protected by limited liability” who are themselves “victims”):

      http://tokyotom.freecapitalists.org/…/satire-oil-spill…/
      http://tokyotom.freecapitalists.org/…/time-light-humor…/

      Tokyo Tom Corporations are “Special sheep with all the constitutional rights of individuals that they are capable of exercising,” Kevin?
      Hah. Try limited liability for one.
      http://archive.freecapitalists.org/…/speech-and…

      Tokyo Tom Corporations are the Health of the State. Is this why you and other good “conservatives” cheer them on, Kevin?
      http://tokyotom.freecapitalists.org/?s=health+of+state
      Tokyo Tom Timothy, can I recommend you look at well-known Republican shareholder activist Robert Monks, and “drone corporations”?
      The most abusive crony corporations tend to be a low-performing bunch of listed firms, with no significant shareholder blocs:
      http://tokyotom.freecapitalists.org/?s=drone+corporation

      Tokyo Tom Stacey, yes, my problem is with “corporatism” and how government-made corporations are the hand-maiden of both the snowballing state, crony capitalism, and confused people across the spectrum bewailing or defending “capitalism!” and “free markets”. is the natural result of governments creating Btw,
      1. BP is half Amoco, and ofc operates in the US through subsidiaries. Did you miss this in my quote? In the period just before 2010, “an astonishing “97 percent of all flagrant violations found in the refining industry by government safety inspectors” came at BP facilities. These included 760 violations rated as “egregious” and “willful.” In contrast, the oil company with the second-worst record had only eight such citations.”

      2. They “are sorry individuals, should they not have rights?”

      Which “they” are you talking about, and for what purposes? If you are talking about “speech”,” then in the case of BP, who is it who is speaking, and for whom? Who speaks for workers killed? Shareholders? Management? Who are the principals, and who are the agents?

      Every individual in BP/connected to BP retains personal rights to speak, and can form voluntary groups to do so if they wish–the doctrine Kevin is pushing is a socialist/collectivist one that DENIES individual accountability and and MASKS self-interest, thus forcing those who interact with or are affected by BP into a position where, since individual accountability is near-impossible, to seek government assistance in getting at least some collective responsibility, but little private redress — very little of whatever the government ends up collecting from BP will actually trickle down, and individuals will remain beholden to the government and to BP for risk management going forward, rather than having direct rights.

      See my above clips on BP cats and the Clarke and Dawe spoof for light takes on unaccountability and who speaks for whom.

      Kevin Gutzman Tom, you have got to be kidding. The reason Obama wants to muzzle corporations is so that he can take more of our money and give it to his constituents, invite more Guatemalans to come here and become his constituents, etc. He sees them as an obstacle, and so he wants to undo American legal precedent dating all the way back to the days when a ratifier of the Constitution was chief justice of the Supreme Court. And you say that I am the one who is pushing statism. Since the Revolution of 1937, there has never been a time when the Democratic Party stood for originalism in constitutional interpretation; they always argue for new, unknown doctrines that advance redistribution, secularization, etc. This new idea that corporations don’t have the rights of individuals is more of the same.
      Tokyo Tom The purpose of the First Amendment was to protect we the people from acts of the Federal government, NOT to protect state-created corporations from the governments and people who make them.The Federal government, this time through the Supreme Court, continues to play the role of helping elites, through state-created corporations, to destroy free markets and local representative government.

      I’m sorry to see so many deluded “conservative” cheerleaders for this.

      Tokyo Tom The answer to the following question is “NO”: [Does it make any sense to treat corporations as “persons”, given the differences in incentive structures?]
      http://tokyotom.freecapitalists.org/…/sense-treat…/
      • Kevin Gutzman Give me a break. The new argument that government can regulate corporate purchases of political advertizing is entirely about protecting incumbents from criticism. McCain said so, explicitly.
        Kevin Gutzman If you think advertizing against Obama is “destroying free markets,” we speak different languages.
      • Tokyo Tom Whip conflation now, Kevin. Try addressing my actual arguments.
      • Kevin Gutzman Show me where the Constitution gives Congress power to regulate purchases of political ads by corporations. You can’t, because it doesn’t. The argument that it does is based on the “reading” of the Commerce Clause invented by Klansman Black and his fellow FDR political hacks in the 1930s. It’s completely contrary to the 10th Amendment.
      • Tokyo Tom I’m not a fan of the Feds regulating anything, Kevin. But the states that make corporations sure as hell have a right to limit what they can do in exchange for very special privileges granted.
      • Tokyo Tom But I already addressed the First Ad several times upthread. Corporations are THINGS, not people. Things don’t “speak”, at least for Constitutional purposes.
      • Tokyo Tom My argument doesn’t refer to the absurd Commerce clause jurisprudence at all.
      • Tokyo Tom “The new argument that government can regulate corporate purchases of political advertizing is entirely about protecting incumbents from criticism.”
        I am sure that this IS the case now, but the argument against allowing corporations to speak (why does NYT get special treatment?) is 100+ years old — pretty sure I copied in a Teddy Roosevelt quote upthread.But you’re a HISTORIAN; you know this already.

        • Stacey York Morris States that “make” corporations? Huh?
        • Tokyo Tom Stacey, yes. Surely you’re aware of “corporation laws”, and checked out the Dartmouth case (rare exception of a one-off corporation made by King George). Corporations are creatures of governments — there are NO “free market” corporations.
        • Tokyo Tom The American Taliban is alive and well in “conservatives” who reflexively defend as “free markets” the corporatism that has always fuelled the “Progressive” movement.
          We have our own Sunni and Shia, battling over who gets to control the State:http://tokyotom.freecapitalists.org/…/state…/
          http://tokyotom.freecapitalists.org/…/dysfunction…/

          Stacey York Morris States don’t create corporations. They tax them but thats not creation. I’m a teeny corporation and trust me, the state did nothing. States don’t have the right to silence them one bit. They do court them but that’s because they bring jobs for their state and lots of tax money. States like Maryland and California blackmail and harass them to death. Charge them for infrastructure and tax them at the federal rate which is highest in world, so they may find a state that is more friendly, but that’s not “creating” them. King George wasn’t a capitalist.
          Tokyo Tom Stacey, unfortunately you’re sounding more like a liberal all the time, with the wrinkle that they deny that governments make corporations because it’s their view that the evil aspects of corporations are due to “capitalism” and “greed”, while with you it’s a desire to defend “free markets” from “greedy” and “grasping” GOVERNMENTS (did you NOT read the Sheldon Richman piece that you posted above)?Undeniably, corporations are made by governments; the fact that governments have, via a race to the bottom have “democratized” the process doesn’t change its nature. Rather, it simply masks the deep roots of corporatism and the reasons for the regulatory state.

          I explained this upthread already, with excerpts from this blog post:

          http://tokyotom.freecapitalists.org/…/corporations…/

          • Brett Sylvester ^ Funny how advocates of free markets can perfectly predict the property norms that would arise in the absence of a sate…
          • Tokyo Tom Brett, if you’re talking to me, I fail to see how you’re addressing anything I’ve said.
            Propertyrights continuously evolve in all societies, as technology, demand, mores and institutions change.So?

          • Tokyo Tom Jeff, focus. We’re only talking about the corporate form – which is undeniably a creature of governments and not free markets. Our Founding Fathers all knew this, and detested the Crown’s corporations/monopolies - does the original Tea Party not ring a bell?
            But you raise an important issue - the deep entanglement of government with business that flows from government creation of corporate forms is what underlies people bashing “business” and “capitalism” when they mean corporatism, as well as why they think governments have rights to micromanage business.
            • Kevin Gutzman I reference specific provisions of the Constitution, and Tom invokes proto-fascist Theodore Roosevelt. Non sequitur.
            • Kevin Gutzman I agree that states have a right to regulate corporate behavior. I oppose the Incorporation Doctrine.
              Kevin Gutzman Since a corporation’s holdings are the pooled property of its shareholders, yes, it has fiduciary responsibility for the property to which they have a natural right. That’s why in Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819), Chief Justice Marshall spoke of the shareholders’ rights in considering the College’s claims.
              • Kevin Gutzman Some corporate crimes lead to incarceration of officers, some don’t.
                The reasons there’s a move to deny that corporations have rights are two: 1) that some politicians don’t like being criticized, and so want to ban corporations from contributing to campaigns against them (as McCain said in explaining the McCain-Feingold Law); and 2) that there’s a general tendency for the Federal Government to deny all rights as they come to mind, and Citizens United brought this particular set to mind.
              • Tokyo Tom “I reference specific provisions of the Constitution, and Tom invokes proto-fascist Theodore Roosevelt. Non sequitur.”Hah. The historian can’t recall or research the history of his own thread.

                Kevin, you said “The new argument that government can regulate corporate purchases of political advertizing [sic] is entirely about protecting incumbents from criticism”; I didn’t disagree as to Dem motives now, but simply said “the argument against allowing corporations to speak (why does NYT get special treatment?) is 100+ years old” and referred to your proto-fascist Teddy Roosevelt.

              • Tokyo Tom “I agree that states have a right to regulate corporate behavior. I oppose the Incorporation Doctrine.”Glad we agree on the first point; on the second, with the exception of Citizens United (on the First Amendment), much of the history of extending Constitutional rights to corporate “persons” has been of “Incorporation” — viz., making the Bill of Rights applicable to state and local governments through the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Corporations now have fourth amendment safeguards against unreasonable regulatory searches; fifth amendment double jeopardy and liberty rights; and sixth and seventh amendment entitlements to trial by jury.

                You oppose these extensions to state-made corporations, presumably, Kevin?

                Then you also OPPOSE the Supreme Court’s SUMMARY extension of its new First Amendment doctrine to the STATES via the 14th Ad “Incorporation” doctrine, in the 2012 Montana case, American Tradition Partnership v. Bullock?

                If you are, then I commend you — other than your failure to point it out to people on this thread.

                http://thehill.com/…/234515-supreme-court-reaffirms…

              • Tokyo Tom Brett: “You’re claiming that society would necessarily not be ordered in a certain wayin the absence of a state, when there’s no reason that it couldn’t be.”No, I’m not; I’m just saying that corporations are made by governments and have rights granted by governments, and observing that these are rights that you and I don’t have — owners of unincorporated businesses don’t have limited liability to persons who they may injure, we die, etc.

                As Marshall said in Dartmouth: “A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law. Being the mere creature of law, it possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it either expressly or as incidental to its very existence.”

              • Tokyo Tom “in Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819), Chief Justice Marshall spoke of the shareholders’ rights in considering the College’s claims.”

                You speak with great authority of matters that Marshall doesn’t address in his opinion. His chief point is to determine that the grant of Dartmouth’s charter was a CONTRACT among the Crown, the founders (donors) and Trustees — not a trust with fiduciary obligations:
                “This is plainly a contract to which the donors, the Trustees, and the Crown (to whose rights and obligations New Hampshire succeeds) were the original parties. It is a contract made on a valuable consideration. It is a contract for the security and disposition of property. It is a contract on the faith of which real and personal estate has been conveyed to the corporation. It is, then, a contract within the letter of the Constitution, and within its spirit also ….”
                http://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/17/518…

              • Tokyo Tom “The 14th Amendment applies to Americans.”
                Due Process and Equal Protection apply to “persons” (there were plenty of non-naturalized Chinese, and the Amendment also had to clarify state and federal citizenship), which is how railroad and other corporations have been able to escape the states and capture the feds.
              • Tokyo Tom “The reasons there’s a move to deny that corporations have rights are two:”And then there are those who want to breathe real meaning back into “federalism” and states rights, and to end the conflation of corporation=business and crony capitalism=capitalism. 

                The key to regaining control over our lives from Big Brother and Big Corporations isn’t the Federal government, but by reining in corporations/revising corporation laws state-by-state.

              • Tokyo Tom HEY THREAD FOLLOWERS —

                Kevin indicated above that, because he opposes the 14th Amendment “Incorporation Doctrine,” he “agree[s] that states have a right to regulate corporate behavior.”
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Does it make any sense to treat corporations as "persons", given the differences in incentives structures?

May 18th, 2010 No comments

 

Well, one may well argue that, if BP were a person, it would be “a career criminal”, but surely not all corporations behave in a criminal matter.

Nevertheless, I think we all recognize that although corporations are owned, managed and staffed by real people, the incentives that people in such organizations face and their consequent collective behavior – what we call the behavior of “the corporation” – may differ quite markedly from those of ordinary, living and breathing humans who live in communities, and from people in groups that do not have limited liability (a feature that underlies the pervasive and increasingly enormous and costly  “moral hazard” problems that our society now confronts), unlimited life and purposes, other favors granted by the state, which have less political power, and for which the “principal-agent problem” is less severe.

So does it make any sense to treat “corporations” under the law – or for purposes of discussions on LvMI pages – as if they have the same rights as real persons?

Allow me to refer to a post I did in wake of the recent Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court : Speech and Sociopaths: Does it make sense to collapse, for Constitutional and legal purposes, the distinctions between human beings and corporate “persons”?

My other posts on the Citizens United decision are here.

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