Leftist opposition to the existence of corporations

Great Debates
1

Based on this but also based on many, many similar threads on this forum I’ve noticed that many left leaning types believe that corporate person hood is this great evil scourge upon society.

I personally think such a view is probably more a product of ignorance of economics and the law than any thing else.

At its core, the reason the “legal fiction” of corporate person hood exists is for the following very good reasons:

  1. It allows a corporation to sue and be sued.
  2. It allows a corporation to own assets.
  3. It allows a corporation to be taxed as a single entity.
  4. It allows a corporation to enter into contracts.

Without those things, much of the economic system that has brought so much prosperity to the world from the mid-19th century until the present day would not exist, much of that prosperity would not exist.

Without the four points I listed, it would be extremely difficult for any large business to exist in which ownership was shared by more than a very small number of persons. That means business ventures would have a difficult to impossible time in raising funding in most cases. It would retard growth, it would have prevented the modernization of society and many technologies we have today would probably not have been brought into production.

In short, life would suck, for everyone, not just rich but also the poor.

Now, there are other things, especially in the United States, that corporate person hood brings.

  1. Court cases have said corporations have rights under the 14th Amendment
  2. Court cases have said corporations have a right to lobby and engage in political speech
  3. Court cases have said corporations can be criminally liable for actions (thus shielding to some degree corporate officers who may be the ones directly responsible for the criminal action

I think that those three things are why many people are incensed about corporate person hood. However, I think the outrage over those things causes people to forget the four “good” things that corporate person hood brings. If not for the existence of the corporation as a separate legal entity, the legal complexity of virtually any major corporate action would essentially preclude them existing on a large scale at all. [As an aside, even if you think all of our progress could have been replicated without corporate person hood I think it’s worth mentioning such a situation would still be worse for society. Corporate person hood is the legal framework that allows a huge number of persons to own a single entity, if it did not exist as a separate legal entity I think a huge number of shareholders would make it much more difficult to control, manage, and operate. It would also just be too dangerous for the average investor. Assuming we would still have the society we have today with nothing but small ownership corporations, we’d actually live in a society in which a greater portion of the nation’s wealth was held by an even smaller number of people. Right now many people complain we live in a society in which the greatest share of national wealth since the great depression is owned by the top 1% and top 10% of the population (based on AGI.) I imagine that would be an even more skewed situation if middle class people were not really able to own shares at all, if major corporations didn’t have stock ownership programs for their employees (in fact some fairly large companies these days are entirely employee owned–something that would be impossible without corporate person hood in my opinion.) Various types of co-operatives would also be unable to exist, be they farmer’s co-ops or utility co-ops.]

I don’t think this is a case where you have to throw out the baby with the bath water, though. Corporate person hood has never been taken to mean “full” person hood. Corporations cannot vote, they cannot run for elected office, they can’t get married, and they can’t adopt children. Corporate person hood is a legal concept and no one who espouses it has ever argued that a corporation is a “real” person. People often latch onto the intrinsically unintuitive concept of the corporate “person” and use it as a “gotcha.” However in the contexts of our legal framework and of our business framework, it really only makes sense.

I think it’s valid to rail against corporations having political protections, rail against corporations serving as a criminal liability shield, or railing against corporate political contributions. You could get rid of probably all of those and the system would still work fine. I won’t argue where I stand on those three positions, but I can totally understand where the left could be against those. But to be against the entire concept is essentially saying you’d like the whole world to be set back technologically and industrially. The development of modern corporations was one of the key moments in our history, one of the things that opened up the door to many of the innovations that have lead to our present society.

I think many people on the left have never heard the phrase perfect is the enemy of the good. Essentially it means that if you are totally against something that isn’t perfect you will often be against things that on the balance are very good for everyone, but are bad in a few ways. In the real world nothing is perfect. The creation of corporations had many negatives, industrialization had many negatives, technological progress had many negatives. However, I think most people if they take an unbiased view will see that the positives outweigh the negatives. In the real world that is how things have to be analyzed, because nothing is “totally good”, and all good things have negative consequences and externalities.

2

Who have you seen express this notion? Besides maybe kanicbird, whom one does not actually engage anyway, that is.

3

The law is whatever we collectively (the government) say it is. That it is written in such a way as to allow a stretch to corporate personhood doesn’t mean it can’t be changed.

Further, even if you reject corporate personhood the law could easily be written to allow corporations to sue and own assets and so on.

Certainly corporations need to be able to do the things you mention. I do not think a corporation is a “person” as contemplated in the US Constitution (for our purposes here in the US). You can write laws to allow corporations to do the listed items without giving them “personhood”.

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Plugging corporations into the above just makes no sense. Certainly they have been squarely at odds with parts of it.

4

The law would effectively be the same thing. You’d be turning around and creating precisely the legal concept you’d just eliminated.

The laws that allow for the very existence of corporations (or charities, or whatever) are what legal personhood ARE. There’s no Constitutional amendment or law that says “corporations are just like people.” There’s a set of laws and a history of jurisprudence that creates legal personhood to do the very things expressed by the OP.

It is worth noting that every developed country in the world has legal personhood of some kind in their laws, and for the most part it’s pretty much the same anywhere you go.

5

I suspect that much of the motivation comes from a desire to lower the status of capitalists and rich people, rather than an understanding of what “personhood” legally means. “Personhood” sounds like a good thing, so we don’t want our status-competition enemies to have it. That’s about the extent of the argumentation I’ve heard, dressed up in prettier rhetoric.

6

SCENE: The grey concrete corridors of Stateville Prison, Death Row. In the background, someone is playing a mournful harmonica in a minor key…

The Warden and the Priest enter the corridor, with appropriate sombre gravity, they approach the cell, and stand quietly while the Guard approaches to unlock the cell. The Warden speaks…

“Halliburton? It’s time…”

7

The distinction is whether a corporation, as an entity, enjoys the rights and protections that I, as an individual citizen, do.

I think laws could be written such that the distinction is made. You grant corporations certain rights but not the same rights that are given to the people.

I see nothing wrong noting that a corporation is a different creature than a citizen and thus has different laws governing its behavior.

8

I know I’ve heard Libertarians attack corporations. One argued, “The corporation is a creature of the state.” Which it is – which does not mean getting rid of the state would get rid of the corporations.

9

Most of the complaint I hear about corps (from the Left and the Libertarian and the Loony) revolve around their 14th amendment rights, and their perceived ability to shield their senior employees and directors from liability. The liability shield can be an issue for many who perceive corporations as existing to make money without ever having to clean up their own mess.

I am one who has argued that the only donations to political campaigns should be by registered voters.

Others complain that, for example, nobody at BP will be held criminally liable for the oil spill (assuming it can be proven that BP knowingly did something wrong). I don’t see a way to make this happen however, and it is a price of the corporate existence.

I know physicians who incorporate so that a lawsuit against them won’t touch any assets. I know landlords who make every single building they own a separate corporation so that a tenant lawsuit can not impact the rest of their empire. When you find out that your lawsuit goes nowhere thanks to smart, nested incorporating spiderwebs, you start to wonder if that was the intent.

10

Which is how it’s done.

It most certainly would. If you had no state, you’d have no corporations. Corporations are a legal concept. Without laws, there aren’t any corporations, just as there would be no Department of the Interior, no “Tax-exempt status,” no legal constructs at all.

You could still have a business, if you could keep it together in a government-less world, of course. But it wouldn’t be a corporation (as in fact many businesses are not corporations now.)

11

I see no reason to grant corporations constitutional protections.

They can get similar protections via laws but they are not people like you or me are people and thus cannot derive their protections directly from the Constitution.

Hence shit like Citizen’s United wouldn’t fly. The SCOTUS would not deem a corporation capable of claiming constitutional protection.

ETA: Perhaps we are talking past each other here. If you could be more explicit in what you mean by your answer I might be able to respond better.

12

Anyone actually interested in understanding the issue should check out this interview.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Controlling_Corporations/Challenge_Corp_Personhood.html

And here’s the timeline thru which SCOTUS rewrote the Constitution to include corporate personhood.
http://www.ratical.org/corporations/ToPRaP.html

And here’s the 1889 case in which they did it.
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=129&invol=26

Irony here. The corporation “lost” the case and settled for $24 (a familiar bargain price) but gained personhood.

The next year, Congress passed the Sherman Anti-Trust Act (haha) and wrote corporate personhood into statute.

There are your loonies.

13

Yes. I doubt intelligent Dopers will disagree.

You dismiss bad points as though they shouldn’t be corrected.
Instead, restrictions are appropriate on corporate “free speech” and politcal contribution rights. Allowing, and even encouraging, corporations is good. But a philosophy to give them rights equal or greater than humans will only lead to reductio ad absurdem.

A frequent problem in today’s America is not that corporations serve the long-term greed interests of their stockholders, but that they don’t. Some recent problems were caused by officers looking for fast bonuses, let long-term stock value be damned. This may be hard to legislate against, but helpful proposals have been made.

14

I like seeing conservatives defend government backed collectivist entities shielded from the consequences of their actions and often acting as barely differentiable from the government itself. It smells like…victory.

The assertion that our transition into modernity would have been impossible without the very particular decisions made in creating American corporations in the late 19th century seems incredibly parochial. The industrial revolution had already been progressing for generations. The attendant upticks in hygiene, medicine, and transfer of the population from the countryside to large cities were already old news. Considering the amount of wealth that corporations have destroyed over the past century, along with their linking up with the government to do horrific things and home and around the world, you can just as easily say they retarded our progress, with about as much evidence. Imagine what we could do with all that money if we didn’t have to pay into the protection racket.

15

Well, for the purposes of this discussion, let’s keep in mind that corporations aren’t able to be sued, able to enter into contracts, and etc because there is a single statute somewhere that says “corporations are persons for the purpose of x, y, and z.” Rather people have coined the term “corporate person hood” because of laws that allow for x y and z. I’m not particularly interested in a convoluted definitional debate so I’ll say no more on this vein.

16

I don’t know what it smells like that the Straight Dope liberals think the word “conservative” is synonymous with: anarcho-capitalism or libertarianism. I guess it probably smells like “stupid.”

There’s a big difference between the way early corporations and larger modern corporations have impacted society. Large ventures like the massive railroad corporations never would have existed under the model of old merchant corporations or the small family corporation model that was the form many early industrial banking and other capitalist ventures took.

The industrial revolution of the pre-corporate world was in no way a movement that would have, without change, resulted in the world we have today. When the ownership pool is small you just don’t have enough capital, and enough individuals to divide the risk to be able to imagine vast railway networks or vast shipping companies or et cetera. Instead you see a few foundries owned by a single corporation, a few mines, and et cetera. You had a few large corporations prior to the various concepts of limited liability and etc, but mostly they were corporations in the form of say, the British East India Company, which enjoyed all the legal protections of modern corporations because of how tightly it was tied into the ruling elite.

It wasn’t until the mid-19th century, when such forms of liability protection became widespread across the Western world that you saw a massive amount of capital start moving around the industrial sector. Also, I’m not asserting changes made in regard to “American” corporations. Various acts such as the Joint Stock Companies Act 1844 and the Limited Liabilities Act 1855 were being enacted by the British. Similar moves happened throughout the Western world, U.S. corporations are not unique in the four points I made above (ability to sue and be sued, ability to enter into contracts, ability to own assets, and ability to be taxed as a single entity.)

17

Just leftist opposition to corporations? I thought it was an American tradition to stick it to them.

And the rest is history… Boston tea party, revolution, independence, etc…

18

I’m not as interested in “opposition” to corporations, which is just a common expression of the always popular “fuck da man” sentiment that’s been around since…forever, as I am in the specific opposition to the legal principle that corporations have some of the abilities and privileges of “persons.” While an earlier poster argued that this is isolated to kanicbird, I have in fact seen many people get their panties in a bunch of the fact that corporations exist as “persons” for many intents and purposes.

It’s my belief that this is due mainly to the fact people are hyper-focused on a few negative aspects of these laws and legal traditions without recognizing the necessity of most of the concept.

19

Opposition to corporations that are not doing the right thing is not the same as opposition to all corporations or the concept. I do understand why many leftists are saying that they never said that they are opposed to all of them.

20

Persons die. persons go to jail. Persons get sick. They are not people that is a legal construct. It was done dishonestly in 1886. We used to revoke corporation charters. When has that happened
Corps are allowed to spend whatever they want to influence elections. It distorts the electoral process in favor of the corps.
Corporations don’t actually do anything. The big execs do.They somehow have assumed the right to spend corporation money, stockholder money, and spend it as they wish. If they want to spend money influencing elections, they should get stockholder votes before they do.