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.
Exactly correct. Corporations need government to influence policy or they would, in many cases, fail in the marketplace.
With all due respect to lincoln though, he was wrong. Labor in and of itself has little value.
You don't have much of a work ethic, do you?
Using abstract reasoning/generalisation is the fundation of real thinking. How can you say that some things cannot be compared without comparing them first? Please, do not commit lobotomy on yourself.
What I did, it was the reductio ad absurdum.
All of that said, the US model of capitalism will never, and can never feature the levels of government intervention and economic guidance experienced in Europe after the fall of the nobility. In Europe, even after the nobility's fall, and even after the various "equalizing" anti monarchical revolutions of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the bourgeoisie were largely uninterested in investing in corporations and therefore the nation states had to fill the void. Our model grew up very differently, and at this point, it is essentially the general public who "run" corporations. The government is a bystander with little but a rare police role, ala Enron and Digital Crossing. So, if anyone wants to bemoan "corporate power" in the USA, we have met the enemy and he is us. In order to improve corporate behavior, it is the thinking of sharholders that must be targetted. Now, as for the matter of non US shareholders, that is a very interesting converation. Are we too lenient in terms of allowing overseas investment in our securities markets? When does foreign ownership of securities become a threat to national security?
"sharholders" S/B shareholders & "converation" S/B conversation.
Was what you did reductio ad absurdum? No.
Survival was not the measure of success in the original comment. Survival and thriving was the measure of success. Your failure to understand the original comment flawed your attempt at logical symbolism but the symolism was flawed as well. After all the reason that we know about the Gulag and Pol Pot is that so many did not survive.
I've argued for years that Micro$oft's ultimate goal is to rule the world. So, this sort of article comes as no surprise to me.
Never? Do you know the future? Nothing is for ever.
Sure you would. You would have a ditch which you didn't have before.
Same principle applies as when the pioneer farmers cleared stumps to create their fields. Nobody paid 'em to do it.
And of what value would a ditch be if I dug one where it wasn't needed? A farmer clearing his land is increasing the plantable area of his farm. There is a plan behind the labor. Certainly anyone can have a good idea and without labor it is useless. Labor without thought is just as useless. Labor has no more inherent value then thought.
If nobody paid you to dig a ditch, and you were dumb enough to dig one that you didn't need, that's your problem.
That's an interesting concept: corporate socialism. Corporations are becoming as bad as the trusts were in the late 1800's. Conservatives need to rethink their pro-business outlook.
It is structurally impossible. The US is the land of mob rule. Thomas L. Friedman, who I generally despise, called it by an appropriate name - The Electronic Herd. The Electronic Herd, for better or worse, controls the US economy.
It would be my problem yes because I would have found out the hard way that labor has no inherent value.
What would you suggest then? The mercantilist mess that has been rampant in this nation of states for the last 100 years at least? Where those that cannot produce as efficiently as their competitors go to the government falsely claiming monopolistic actions? Capitalism hasn't existed in this nation of states for many years.
The suggestion is Distributism, first thunk-up by GK Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc.
It's a small-business/agriculture oriented system which utilizes some aspects of the Guild system. Unlike the current situation, it's centered on people, rather than money.
The difficulty will be in persuading most Americans that being filthy-rich is NOT an ideal; rather, that being comfortable is sufficient.
I'm not telling you that the system will work easily; I'm just telling you the answer to your question.
Lincoln's point was NOT "labor"--but rather, men, or specifically, each man.
IOW, Lincoln placed the emphasis on one's neighbor, not some machine or pile of cash.
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