Posted on 10/11/2004 1:14:10 AM PDT by JohnHuang2
Monday, October 11, 2004
By Vox Day
© 2004 WorldNetDaily.com
One of the most widely believed myths in America today is the belief that corporations are an inherent part of capitalism. Concomitant with this is the idea that big corporations and big government have an intrinsically hostile relationship and that the stock market is a free market.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Capitalism was already well entrenched and the Industrial Revolution was complete when the U.S. Supreme Court radically altered the concept of the corporate charter in 1886 by ruling that the Southern Pacific Railroad that was a "natural person" under the U.S. Constitution. Prior to this time, corporations were strictly controlled by state law, which is why the word "limited" still occurs in corporate language.
The Supreme Court had tried once before to expand corporate power by stripping sovereignty from the state of New Hampshire in 1819. In response, many states wrote laws to ensure that they would retain their sovereignty – 19 "even amended their constitutions to make corporate charters subject to alteration or revocation by their legislatures".
The 1886 ruling trumped these efforts, fulfilling Thomas Jefferson's prescient fears. In a letter to George Logan written on Nov. 12, 1816, he wrote:
I hope we shall take warning from the example and crush in it's birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws our country.
But these monied corporations did more than challenge our government, they corrupted it entirely and established a symbiotic relationship with it. This symbiotic relationship is openly anti-capitalistic, as undying corporations take advantage of laws originally written to protect the entrepeneurs who are the genuine engine of technological progress and economic growth, and use them to sustain their unnatural, parasitic life.
For example, Disney successfully lobbied Congress in 1998 to extend the period of copyright law for 20 years, increasing it to the life of the author plus 70 years. This is obviously of no benefit to a deceased author or his children, but it does prevent Mickey Mouse from entering the public domain while remaining technically within the constitutional dictates that copyrights be granted for a "limited time."
Corporations also use the government to protect their pool of investment money in the stock market. Due to the massive regulation of this anti-capitalist and unfree market, entrepreneurs needing to raise large sums of capital to challenge established corporate competitors are forced to submit to the predatory regime of the investment banks. In a genuinely free market, the owners of small, but growing businesses could simply sell their public shares over the Internet to anyone who wished to invest.
Indeed, with today's high-speed communications technology and digital money, there is no more need for Wall Street than there is for Congress. Eliminating both and replacing them with electronic systems – Free and Open Source, of course – would result in the realization of significantly more pure and efficient strains of capitalism and democracy alike.
One need only look at the various socialist and communist states around the world and the friendly relations that giant Western multinationals have with them to realize there is no fundamental link between capitalism and corporations. Gozprom, LUKoil and 400 other Soviet corporations were operating inside and outside the USSR prior to 1989, while Communist China not only permits corporations, but owns several that are listed on the Global Fortune 500. Some of them, such as PetroChina and Sinopec, are even traded on the Hong Kong and New York stock markets.
In fact, it is not the Chinese government, but the People's Liberation Army that owns the International Trust and Investment Corporation, which among other things has more than 200 Canadian corporations and is the largest "private" operator of shipping container terminals.
Not everything to which the idiot Left is hostile is necessarily good. It is impossible to assert that the age of untrammeled corporatism has been friendly to individual liberty or prosperity, especially when real wages have been falling for three decades – they are 14 percent lower than they were in 1972.
The genius of human invention and the undeniable blessings of capitalism do not stem from artificial structures at law, they come only from the mind of the individual. Conservatives would do well to remember that the next time that the corporations go to their comrades in Congress, demanding more violations of human freedom and more restrictions on individual liberty in order to sustain their vampirish unlives.
It is the regular discussion of the days precedent to 1886. When "fiduciary duty" and "agency" where far more respected in the courts and by the public.
The "tax reform" bill now almost on the desk of the President has been called the "General Electric Welfare Bill" for the number of tax goodies inserted which benefit GE--almost exclusively GE.
Sounds good on the outside, of course--lots of folks here will be just delighted (!!!) to hear that there's a lessening of the tax burden for corporations in the US.
But it ain't necessarily so.
No, they loved having government having complete authority over corporations, just as the author is proposing.
Corporations are necessary in a modern society. They provide the organization, capital, efficiencies of scale and infrastructure necessary for production, R&D etc. etc. etc.
Is capitalism ideal? No. But nothing is ideal. And, when combined with democracy, there's the opportunity to smooth out the bumps and the humps.
Really?
ARe you trying to tell us that Jefferson was a "Fringie" or a Nazi?
Read the editorial. Comment based on what you read, not what boogeymen you IMAGINE.
Yet the courts have created and the legislatures have allowed our, We the People's, mastery to be mooted and we are made peons and vassals before a corporation.
You want me to play Hamilton to your Jefferson?
For otherwise your comments to mark are like those of an unlearned and rude child speaking to group of experienced scholars. They don't do you well.
JimRob's concept of Free Republic allows for debate. GWB's domestic economic policies are subject to intelligent and well-informed debate on these boards.
For that matter, so is GWB's foreign policy.
GWB is not infallible, nor is he God's gift to the USA. He's a decent man with solid morals; but some of the morons he hired need to get a real life--Mankiw comes to mind.
Apologies for Corporate Success at Any Cost are not going to play well with the majority of Americans, especially conservatives who have read and understood Edmund Burke.
I'm well aware of the nature of corporations, as well as their history and current role in society and global economics.
Depending on the by-laws, most likely the Executive Board.
That is anarchy! You argue that coporate charters are not instruments that make them subservient to a state, and to do so is to say that no mere nation may dictate what a corporation may do -- a coporation, in that line of thought -- is a god to itself!
You might want to update your reading list a bit, say at least into the 20th century.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/052165629X/104-5332190-7685562?v=glance
I get to stuff like this and I can't evade the feeling that somebody's putting me on.
Time to ask the invisible question. None of these economic triple geniuses have ever seen it, let alone answer it.
How is it possible that the arguably greatest generation, postwar, managed to survive (never mind thrive) without medicare and universal health care, the EPA and dozens of government supported NGOs?
This suggests the author considers the US government as entirely alienated from the people, and, therefore, subject to righteous overthrow. I say, wait just a minute. Whenever an institution is taxed, regulated, constrained, controlled by government policy, it will seek to influence that policy for its benefit. There is nothing sinister about this. The problem is the over-reach of government, not the reaction of corporations to the yoke.
The author does not present an alternative form of relationship by which people may unite their resources to provide social goods and services in the pursuit of a return on their investment. This seems like infantile rebellion, much like Michael Moore.
There was a booming economy. Age expectancy was lower. And industry wasn't playing around with as many toxins.
As for healthcare -- even discounting what happened in 1918, we're dealing with some nasty bugs now, HepA to HepZ, etc. Do you want the guy making your salad in the kitchen not to have access to an emergency room?
PRIOR -- coporations and capitalism both did more-or-less happily exist together. That we should bring tham back from the wilds of self-sovereignity, reign them in and tame them as they once were -- or at least back towards that direction -- that is the argument.
Thanks! I knew there was some mechanism, but wasn't familiar with what it was -- was it a part of the tender offer for shares, or part of the case law, or part of the legislated law governing the formation and dissolution of coporations. You say its the by-laws.
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