# must corporations be entirely evil to be hated? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [August 26, 2000, 2:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/must-corporations-be-entirely-evil-to-be-hated/30789 "2000-08-26T02:16:19Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 2\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![waterj2](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/858c86/32.png) [@waterj2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/waterj2)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2000, 2:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/must-corporations-be-entirely-evil-to-be-hated/30789/21 "2000-08-27T02:35:16Z")
Well, sailor, you and I are still here fighting the good fight. > [@](#): > > as an aside, “A house has more value than the resources from which it was created” is almost completely wrong. why? because the resources of which you speak are only the tangible resources. A house’s value is based upon such things as the labor which went into its construction, the land it is on and the surrounding area, yes even the mental and artistic resources poured into it by F. L. Wright. No, the house’s value is based on what people are willing to pay for it. It would be incredibly expensive to build a house on an offshore oil platform in the North Sea. Such a house would still have very little value, because no one really wants to live there. If no one were willing to pay _more_ than what the sum of the resources (tangible and intangible) involved would be worth separately, then it would not have gotten built. > [@](#): > > why almost completely wrong? because, true, there are intangible and immeasurable factors which go into value. but in the point of fact, that value has a limit. suppose I want a painting, and am willing to pay as much as possible for it. I couldn’t, say, offer more money than is in worldwide circulation, could I? well I could, but not successfully or realistically. However you can offer, and pay, more money than you currently have. You simply take out a loan. The bank that loans the money takes it from my savings account, for example. However, all the money in my savings account is still there, as far as I’m concerned. If I need it back, the bank gets the money from somewhere else. On a large enough scale, this system actually works to create wealth (also inflation, but that’s another discussion entirely). > [@](#): > > the amount of money worldwide may be growing, and more and more resources may be pumped into such money, but there is number one some fixed limit (of which I know nothing) to those resources, and number two at any given time the amount of money is fixed. At any given time, the location of your car is fixed. Looking at it that way is pretty stupid when you’re driving along the highway, however. ---
**Author:** ![Triskadecamus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b19c9b/32.png) [@Triskadecamus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Triskadecamus)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2000, 6:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/must-corporations-be-entirely-evil-to-be-hated/30789/22 "2000-08-27T06:36:42Z")
I could take a number 2 pencil, and a ream of foolscap, and spend a few months and produce a screenplay that would win an Academy Award. (Hey, it could happen!) I would have created something worth millions of dollars in our society using no more than $10 in resources. I could write an integrated utility to replace Windows, MSIE and MS Office, and use only a few dollars in electricity. Microsoft would buy a paperwork fiction corporation based on it for millions. Money is not the problem. Money is counting equipment. The problem with corporations is they are granted rights as if they were persons. They are not persons, and should have no rights. A corporation is basically a pile of money. Piles of money are not persons. They are not evil. They are not good. They are a disguise worn by someone to pretend that their decisions are not their own, and the consequences of those decisions should not be theirs either. The corporations themselves are not the problem, it is the protected position they grant to people that is the problem. When the Hooker Chemical Corporation decided to ignore the reports of its own investigators and sell the Love Canal property for home development they knowingly committed negligent homicide. Hooker Chemical could not be found guilty, or even charged. The executive officers of Hooker Chemical could not be charged with any specific act of the whole company either, only for individual acts, none of which were held to be entirely responsible for the “corporate decision.” So the deaths of those children who did die, as predicted, was not a crime. Tris [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/must-corporations-be-entirely-evil-to-be-hated/30789.md?page=1)