Ok. So is this a failure inherent in the structure of corporations or in the way that we govern them? I’d say the latter.
I don’t know that this is necessarily true. Depending on what you mean by “bankrupting” the company. And declaring bankruptcy to avoid liability is not as straightforward as you appear to believe.
Regards,
Shodan
Scylla,
The topic is personal responsibility in the context of Conservative values. If personal responsibility is a conservative value then Conservatives must reject the corporate form because the corporate form is constructed to eliminate personal responsibility. It is their purpose, not the result of ‘failure’.
You seem to think that conservatives are required to take a view of different forms of responsibility straight out of a “Highlander” movie, i.e. “There can be only one!!!”
This is not true.
Personal responsibility is the responsibility a person can have.
Corporate responsibility is what a corporation has.
They are not mutually exclusive in the least.
“…kill her unborn baby…” Is an emoting phrase. Terminating a pregnancy must be the personal responsibility of the pregnant woman regardless of your value judgement of the result.
Unless, of course, personal responsibility is not a Conservative value. Is that your position?
Is it the Conservative position that the state should control all sexual activity - with whom, whether or not licensed, appliances incorporated, associated medical procedures, disposition of resulting children -?
It’d be really swell if you quit acting as though the definition of personal responsibility in light of Conservative values that you asserted above is the accepted definition and that all answers must conform to it.
Scylla,
Sorry, I did not make my point clear.
The reason for the existence of the corporate form is to shield the owners from legal and/or fiscal responsibility. This is not an aberration. It is the stated purpose of the corporate form.
It is my observation that Conservative Personal Responsibility takes the form of a cult myth.
Perhaps someone can provide a Conservative definition of personal responsibility.
I have to agree with Puddlegum and state that you have a very odd and noncomforming definition of personal which I don’t accept.
That would be the purpose of an LLC. It is not the purpose of corporations in general.
I did so earlier in the thread. It is the idea that respect for both the self and others means that one should strive to live their life diligently and prudently so as to minimize the chances of becoming a burden on others, and to maximize one’s utility both to themselves and other. It means you take care of yourself so that others do not have to. It follows from that naturally that you accept the consequences of your actions, but more importantly that you have the duty to be aware of them.
It’s really a philosophical thing, as I addressed earlier, and I think it can be traced pretty directly to classical stoicism (the most underrated and least understood philosophy of all time.). I’d suggest going back and reading my first few posts in this thread.
Absent any attempts to avoid debt, why would you need to bankrupt the corporation? You could simply shut it down, or leave it as a shell with no assets. Much cheaper.
Is your belief that setting up schemes to deliver poor quality products and avoid warranties is an example of conservative values?
Personal responsibility: You are free to make whatever decision you wish, those decisions come with consequences. If abortion was illegal, then the responsibility to raise said child is to the mother and father who created him/her/
WS,
By bankrupting the company, you avoid any subsequent consequences. It is routinely done in construction, mining and oil drilling.
The incorporators take out the money then terminate the corporation and with it, responsibility. Any spill over costs are paid by the tax payers.
My bolding. This statement is both true and naive. A purpose of corporations is to limit the liability of investors. If I invest £1000 in an incorporated shipping voyage, if that voyage goes bad, then I lose my £1000. However, I’m not on hook to the banks that loaned money to the corporation to charter and fit out the ship. The banks have taken on the risk that a voyage may go bad, and accordingly charge a higher rate of interest. Offsetting their risk is that with the existence of incorporated voyages, more ship voyages will occur and the banks have more opportunities to issue loans and receive high-yield interest payments.
I’ll agree that this reduction in individual risk equates to a reduction in individual responsibility. However, if you think that’s a bad thing, you’re arguing against over 400 years of history.
Scylla,
The early discussion centered on social welfare. That is one facet of personal responsibility.
Internally personal responsibility may be a philosophy or state of mind but in the context of citizenship it is the sphere of events that result from ones actions - those things over which one has authority.
Consider:
Open mine and well shafts are an ever present danger. In the case above, the original owner abandoned the mine shaft without closing the opening. Is he personally responsible for the death?
There’s no need to bankrupt the company to avoid any subsequent consequences. The liability of investors is already limited. You seem to be under the impression that a bankruptcy provides a layer of protection against nefarious external payments. If anything, the opposite is true. Debtors have no right to file suit against receivers of corporate payments. Bankruptcy administrators do.
I’ve just realised that this is a hijack of the thread, and while I’m interested in any feedback you care to provide, unless it relates to personal responsibility, I’m going to abstain from responding. If you’d like a discussion of the ethics or functionality of corporate bankruptcy with my input, please start a new thread.
You are talking about liability.
Scylla,
Yes, liability is another term for personal responsibility.
No. We are not talking about the same thing.
OK - my definition of personal responsibility is that one is accountable for all acts personal, physical, legal and financial over which one has authority.
Show me yours.
You know, after I posted last night I thought "I bet that bit about such jobs being meant for teenagers whose families are well able to support them is going to show up’.
And if that were really what was going on, there’d be something in that argument. But for there to be anything in that argument, then it would have to be in the ordinary course of events for nearly everyone to work such jobs as teenagers – and probably for a while afterwards, because there’s massively more poorly paid work than could possibly be done by teenagers, especially if they’re supposed to have any chance to go to school; and then it would need to be in the ordinary course of events for nearly everyone, by the time they were old enough to start raising kids, to start being paid enough to support themselves and to support those kids.
But that’s not what happens. What happens is that yes, some teenagers who don’t really need the money take such jobs for a while and then move on to much better paid work; some other people never do the poorly paid work at all; and a whole lot of others wind up in such work as adults, because most of it is, after all, the basic work that needs to be done to keep the society going, so we need a whole lot of people to do it.
I’m 68. During my life ever since I became old enough to notice, every time that there have been proposals to raise the minimum wage I’ve seen those same arguments. And every time, sooner or later, the minimum wage gets raised; generally not enough, but far more than those people making the arguments want it raised. And every time so far the roof has not fallen in and society has not collapsed.
Alternatively, of course, we could leave wages where they are, but provide benefits to the people in those jobs so that they can still live decent lives – and do so without giving them a hard time about qualifying, without making them worry every month that they won’t have enough to manage, and in particular without complaining that they’re not being personally responsible and therefore don’t really deserve any help.
Theoretically, property taxes aren’t regressive, because they’re generally based on the value of the property, and rich people do indeed buy or rent more expensive houses than poor people do (though as there are multiple factors involved that’s not a perfect match.)
But they are indeed often regressive in practice, because current value of a home is often drastically disconnected from both current income and overall wealth of its owner(s).
People don’t pack up and move every year to a house or apartment commensurate with their current income. (If they did, not only would this be massively disruptive both of community ties and of individual lives, but it would be horrendously expensive.) It’s quite common, in many areas, for people to still be living in property they purchased twenty or fifty years ago, or that their parents or grandparents purchased even longer ago. Many places that were cheap when they were bought have become horrendously expensive due to accidents of location – lakefront property even if liable to flooding, for instance, is now often priced extremely high. And the tax assessments are based on what somebody – almost anybody, including someone from a densely populated area on the far side of the country – would pay for it. So people with almost no financial resources can wind up stuck with the same property tax the millionaire is paying.
Huh?
A lack of incentives means that people don’t see any likely chance that changing what they’re doing will produce any improvement. That doesn’t mean that they’re satisfied. It only means that they don’t want to go through a lot of extra trouble and disruption in order to wind up no better off, and considering the costs of said trouble and disruption quite possibly worse off.
No, that’s not the unfortunate reality we must recognize. You’ve entirely missed possibility 4:
We as a society invest in plants manufacturing solar panels, windmills and windmill equipment, and whatever else actually is currently needed; site these plants in areas where coal mines and other obsolete or otherwise unfavored jobs are dying; and provide training and work in the area where the people losing their jobs are already living, so they don’t need to move away from the places they’ve lived their whole lives, their friends and family, and not so incidentally the support structure provided by those friends and family, which is probably all that’s keeping them going right now.
We could use for that purpose some of the $649 billion we’re currently spending to subsidize fossil fuels.
But the whole point being made here is that they’re not supporting themselves at a low paying job; because those jobs don’t pay enough for people to support themselves on.
So you do need to be aware of the consequences, and are responsible for them, if the pesticide used to grow your grapes is killing children in the country in which the grapes are grown but you buy those grapes even though you could afford to buy ones grown without doing such damage?
I thought in post 88 that you were giving being aware of the consequences of which food you choose to buy as an example of something you thought was absurd to bother with. Maybe I was wrong.
And we are all a burden on each other. It’s unavoidable. We should all do our best to carry our share of the burden; but claiming you can be entirely self sufficient requires a very narrow and temporary definition of “self sufficient.” You are dependent, among other things, on the work being done by the people in those jobs which don’t pay enough to live on.