Is assuming personal liability your only "good" option to overreaching government interference?
How about going back to contractual law that might allow a business to claim protection from personal liability unless recklessness or negligence?
When corporations were first formed in the US, shareholders actually were personally liable for the company. This was a big deal, people were very wary of this whole indemnification thing. They rightly saw it as a way for criminals to escape justice. So back then, say you had a dollar in stock in JP Morgan, and the company was convicted of a crime or sued and lost - you would be personally liable, to the limits of your one dollar share.
Of course, corporate owners, operators and lawyers then ran for Congress, got in and changed the laws to be more and more and more protective, until we ended up... here... wherever we are.
Ironically, personal liability is currently in many ways technically safer than incorporating, because all of the courts are now corporate administrative courts. They can still sit in common law if they so choose, but they - never - so choose. Again, back in the 1800’s common law courts and administrative courts were two completely different animals (as, in fact, they actually are - their jurisdictional powers and presumptions are 180 degrees opposite one another). So today if you are not a corporation, and run a business, and someone sues you, you can simply point out that you are not a corporate entity, and therefore the laws they are invoking to sue you dont apply to you.
Problem is, on the State level, there’s no fixed method to do this like on the federal level. And on any level, the actual definitions of these terms are written in Sanskrit, scrambled in PGP, printed out on toilet paper and thrown into the ocean. So you can spend a lot of money trying to prove you are not a corporation, and the government never has to prove you are one - even if you have no incorporation papers. It’s that crazy.
Yet, ultimately, it’s also that simple. The Big Lie is always simple. It’s just... BIG.
I can’t say I know what to do about it. For me it’s like one of those two faces vs. wine glass visual puzzles - once you see the wine glass, you always see the wine glass. Well, it’s the same with this subject. They always use corporate terms very carefully, and peculiar parts of legal construction, etc. It’s just “the way it’s done.”
As for contract law liability limitations to recklessness and negligence, yeah, they apply. It’s just that the whole fabric of the court system is caught up in corporate applications of these issues, and once you step into a court without carefully declaring “special appearance,” the court “presumes” you’ve admitted you are a corporation. And then game over.
They might be evil, but they’re not stupid. Many generations of legal minds went into creating this web, motivated by a lot of power and a lot of money. If you look at is from a purely structural point of view, it’s actually quite brilliant. Too bad it’s being used so inappropriately.
“In the 1800’s (I assume before all this convoluted corporate law), how did businesses protect its individual members from personal liability or were they not protected?”
Back then, their liability was limited to what they had agreed to do for a given individual, based on Winterbottom v Wright (1842) 10 M&W 109. As Wiki puts it: “In 1842, the law’s only recognition of “negligence” was in respect of a breach of contract. As the plaintiff was not in a contract with the defendant the court ruled in favour of the defendant on the basis of the doctrine of privity of contract...
...”If the plaintiff can sue,” said Lord ABINGER, the Chief Baron, “every passenger or even any person passing along the road, who was injured by the upsetting of the coach, might bring a similar action. Unless we confine the operation of such contracts as this to the parties who enter into them, the most absurd and outrageous consequences, to which I can see no limit, would ensue.””
In the US, that changed with MacPherson v. Buick Motor Co. (1916). “The principle that the danger must be imminent does not change, but the things subject to the principle do change. They are whatever the needs of life in a developing civilization require them to be.” Judge Cardozo, writing for the New York Court of Appeals, overturned the idea that lawsuits should be limited to those with a contract, and extend instead to...everyone. And as had been foreseen years earlier, “...the most absurd and outrageous consequences, to which I can see no limit, [have] ensue[d]...”