In my experience, headhunters are very forthright about their desire to kill people, eat them, and hang their shrunken, stuffed heads from strings around their neck. Obviously, you should fire them if they look overly hungry and there is no one else for them to eat. Or if they catch and eat people other than those you hired them to catch and eat. Employed with care and attention, though, headhunters can bring something to your business that no other employee can: abject terror in those that oppose you.
Wrong, and disingenuous. If you were right, advertisers would not use techniques that appeal to emotions. Yet people go to school for years to learn those techniques, and they are taught very frankly, as ways of manipulating people through those emotions and insecurities. If you were right, advertisements would be simple lists of the features of products, and that is all. We both know that is not the case.
You shit out the following piece of verbal diarrhea:
It is completely, thoroughly, and utterly impossible for an advertisement to make someone buy something against their will. It has never happened even once. And you know it. You pretend otherwise because you want to relieve yourself of the responsibility for your bad purchasing decisions and pretend the nasty marketers made you do it.
Let's analyze that. I don't make bad purchasing decisions. In fact, I purchase very little, preferring to invest my money. When I do make major purchases, I research from unbiased sources.
I don't see ads, ever. I filter them on the Internet, skip them on my Tivo, flip the page in magazines, and look away from signs. I take the free things that advertising provides and I spit in the advertisers face. They are fucking evil, manipulative con men.
My question to you is, if you are right, why do people pay for advertising? Of what use is it? Why, if it is only to tell us what is available so that we may make rational choices, do advertisers employ techniques that appeal to emotions, and not to logic? I think you know why. In fact, you probably went to school to learn all about it, didn't you?
Are you arguing that black criminals do more harm to society than white criminals? Or are you arguing that we simply can't compare the amount of damage done, and therefore it is as ludicrous to say that whites do more than blacks as it is to say that blacks do more than whites? Either way, I win the argument and OeLeWaPpErKe loses...
I did cover that aspect: "And because we keep blacks in second class positions through institutionalized racism, they do not have the same opportunities that the dominant whites do." But blacks use of drugs is targeted much more harshly than whites. Cocaine and crack are the same damn thing, yet crack, which is seen as a black person's drug, will get you longer mandatory sentences than the same amount of cocaine. Blacks are also far more likely to be stopped and searched than whites.
I find manipulation offensive. I'm not saying people should be forbidden to try it. But free speech works both way. That's its strength. We don't forbid people from joining the KKK and saying blacks are subhuman. We let them shout their idiocy to the world, and everyone else gets to call them racist antisocial idiots.
Well, advertisers are free to attempt to manipulate people and I'm free to say, manipulation is immoral. Are you arguing against my right to say that, or against the fact that manipulation is wrong?
You are either arguing that manipulation is good and desirable, or you are arguing that I should not be allowed to criticize manipulation. Which is it? Please, be as clear as possible.
Again, there is a difference between saying, people should be restricted from doing something, and saying, doing something is harmful and immoral and people who do it deserve no respect. I fully recognize your right to lie to me. But I refuse to respect you if you do. Understand?
I am not saying advertising and marketing should be forbidden, just that we should not respect those who engage in such a practice any more than we should respect other liars and con-men.
Let's break down your argument. I say,
I'm saying advertising is immoral, and that people should not support advertising or marketing because it is an attempt to get them to do things based on emotional manipulation.
and you reply,
Yes, we get that you're saying that, it's just that you're wrong. People have a right to attempt to pursuade others around to their point of view - it's a fundamental freedom.
You appear to be arguing that people should let themselves be manipulated because it is everyone's right to manipulate people. I'm saying, people should not let themselves be manipulated. Oh, they should not restrict anyone from trying, but they should make sure that all such dishonest efforts are a waste of time.
If a product is good, and suits my needs, I will buy it. Not because someone manipulated me into thinking the company that provides it is my best buddy. If you imply that a product will get me laid, or increase my social status, or you make other improbable claims for said product, I respect your right to lie like that, but I do not respect you for being a liar.
I'm saying advertising is immoral, and that people should not support advertising or marketing because it is an attempt to get them to do things based on emotional manipulation. I'm saying that moral individuals should not consider it an acceptable career. I'm saying we should point out to those who do it exactly what they are doing, and why it is wrong. I'm saying we should viciously mock anyone in the industry and that they should be accorded the respect we give all other con artists and frauds.
I'm NOT saying the government should restrict advertising. I'm saying, when these sick fucks attempt to justify their immoral actions, we should spit in their faces and tell them where they can shove it. They want to play at manipulation and mind control, fine. but they don't get to have my respect, or the respect of any decent people. Advertising or marketing, as a career, is a waste of a human life and creativity.
You know, you almost succeeded in diverting attention away from your initial argument and into a morass of conflicting definitions. Let me draw attention back to the your initial reply:
I must disagree with you. Corporations have always been persons. The word incorporate implies that. A person is merely a legal entity. If your neighbor's dog bites you, you can't sue your neighbor's dog, because the dog's not a person. You have to sue your neighbor.
Personhood is what obliges corporations to obey the law and by extension why they have rights.
This was in reply to my assertion:
Not much in the way of joint stock limited liability corporations before the the East India Company, was there? Maybe a few Dutch corporations. But I'd say, back to the early days of the US, when corporations like the EIC were seen as despotic enemies, and all corporations were limited to only perform the business for which they were chartered, could not own stock in other corporations, were limited in duration, were limited in geographic scope of business, and had no human rights as a legal person.
I have successfully showed that corporations have increased their rights, whether we use the terms 'human rights' 'personal rights' or 'civil liberties' is irrelevant. My point is that corporations were limited in their rights, and now they are not. It was never any sort of major point that corporations were considered 'persons' or not. The point is the encroachment of corporate power over individuals.
You attempt to defend this by likening corporations to slaves, which is ludicrous. You do not actually argue as to why it is good for corporations to have more rights. You do not actually argue as to why it was bad that their rights were limited. By comparing them to slaves, you attempt to engage emotions, not logic.
Let's define the parameters of this discussion more clearly so we are not sidetracked into little semantic games, okay?
It is my position that the extension of corporate rights is a bad thing. Let me list the specific limitations I think are positive:
1.) Corporations could not own stock in other corporations. 2.) Corportations could only do business as outlined in their charter. 3.) Corporations could only do business in the area outlined in their charter. 4.) Corporations had a limited lifespan (although this was never carried out in practice, so I mention it only for the sake of completeness.) 5.)Corporations had no right to free speech. Only individual humans did.
Now, these limitations did not in any way limit the rights of individuals. They limited the ability of groups of individuals to hold power over others. Granting corporations unlimited rights has allowed them to exert enormous amounts of power over each of our daily lives. This power comes without any sort of representation, and amounts to tyranny.
Now that I have made my points clear, perhaps you could attempt to discuss them rather than trying to throw the discussion off track with useless debates over semantics.
In their own minds, they are helping deliver valuable products that people enjoy, and informing them about their choices. Cognitive dissonance keeps them from thinking about what they are really doing. It keeps them from putting two and and two together. They went to school to learn mind control. In their own discussions they can be very frank about the fact that they want to control people and get them to do things that may be against their best interest, but they can not see that in moral terms they are doing something very, very wrong. They are planting false ideas in people's heads, making them believe that a company loves them, that a beer will make them sexy, that a pill will make their dicks bigger or their bellies smaller, that choosing the right products will make them popular and happy. They are preying on people's insecurities. And it works. If marketing were not capable of controlling people's actions, it would be useless.
You know, there is another class of goods that gets accused of controlling people's actions and making them do harmful things against their will: drugs. We can't even prove that drugs do this, while advertising would not be salable if it didn't. Why are drugs illegal but advertising is legal?
If you add up the monetary damages and the damage to people's lives, white crime is FAR bigger than black crime. Think white collar crime. The guys in charge in Bhopal were white. Think of all the millions of lives ruined over the years by corporate malfeasance. Sure, blacks are incarcerated at a far higher rate than whites but this is because we've criminalized the victimless crime of drug possession. And because police are more likely to stop and arrest a black person than a white person. And because we keep blacks in second class positions through institutionalized racism, they do not have the same opportunities that the dominant whites do.
You say such discussions are not possible, yet here we are having that discussion. You are exhibiting symptoms of paranoid delusion and severe cognitive dissonance.
A market can be made unfree by government decree, or by the actions of those in the market. A monopoly or monopsony is not a free market, for instance. A pump and dump scheme makes the market it is done in unfree, in that it no longer has the important and beneficial characteristics of a free market. Government intervention can actually make markets MORE free than if it were left up to the participants.
Interesting bit about the birth of insurance, but I'm not sure how accurate it is. In many states including mine, you can set up a pre-tax medical fund and pay for any medical expenses out of that, which kind of demolishes the main argument of the Time piece. But the insurance system is an oligopoly, not a free market, so you as an individual, even working with pre-tax money, do not have enough buying power to get a good deal. And the privately created barriers to entry into the insurance game ensure that nobody new can get in and ruin the entrenched player's profits.
Yes. We have the capacity for loving kindness and fairness, and we have the capacity for utter brutality. As my father is a noted psychologist, I grew up knowing about the Stanford experiment, the Milgram experiment, and many others. My point is that we can understand the conditions that lead people to treat others with fairness, and the conditions that lead people to treat people with brutality. We can increase the former conditions while limiting the later. Systems that lead people to act brutally are inefficient and unhealthy systems, while systems that lead people to act with loving kindness and fairness are efficient and healthy systems.
Health care is a type of good can't be fairly traded in a free market. The imbalance of information is simply too great, skewing the costs. It is also a public good, in that good health in others contributes to everyone's well being.
But more than that, providing health care to all is a moral issue. We are the only rich and powerful nation that does not see it as such. Every nation that has socialized health care framed it as a moral issue: letting the poor die is just wrong.
The only point of clarification I need to bring up here is that by 'most stakeholders' I was specifically excluding shareholders. The system is designed to let them exercise control. Oh sure, it's one share one vote not one person one vote like in a democracy. But stockholders have control, they are the owners. The workers, customers, suppliers and neighbors also all have a stake in the endeavor, but they have no representation in the decision making process.
Governments and businesses are no different in that you can only boycott them if you have an alternative. What Randy Weaver was trying to do was not a boycott, it was theft. He was taking the services of the government, like armed protection, roads, a legal system, and so forth, without paying for them. Try to do that to a corporation and see what happens. To boycott a government or a business, by definition, you need to leave the store and not partake of the goods and services. As far as I know, nobody was forcing Randy to stay in the US. He had the same freedom that some poor schub living in a company town and dealing with the company monopoly does: he could leave. Might not be easy, and there may not actually be any other options out there for him, but that is not the fault of the government or business itself, is it?
If I don't like the menu at McDonalds, but it is three in the morning and no place else is open, that does not give me the right to camp out in McDonalds and demand they feed me caviar for two cents a spoonful. If I don't like the country I'm in, but I like every other country even less, or can't get citizenship, that does not give me the right to demand that the country do things my way. Either stop voluntarily taking the goods and services offered, or shut the hell up.
What I mean is that every right granted to humans is, if applicable, granted to corporations. Political asylum is not a human right, at least, not everyone recognizes that just anyone has the right to it. And corporations have citizenship. They have all the protections that come along with citizenship. A corporation has a right to free speech. It can be discriminated against. It can hold property. Every right granted to US citizens is granted to corporations.
It did not used to be that way, a corporation could not own just any property, like stock in other companies. A corporation could not be slandered. It had no right to free speech. Oh, the individuals making up a corporation had all those rights, but the corporation itself did not. A person's right to free speech entitles them to lie to you. Fox News sued for their right to lie to us on the air, and won. Is that really a good thing?
A corporation is a tool for oppression. It is not a human held in slavery, it is slavery. We went from right to wrong, not the other way around, by giving corporations rights that people have when the people that make up a corporation already have those rights individually.
Your freedom ends when it infringes mine. You don't have the freedom to shit in my yard, you don't have the freedom to steal from me, your right to swing your fist ends with my face. Why do we make racketeering illegal? Why do we make conspiracy illegal? Why do we make Ponzi schemes illegal? Why do we take away people's freedoms to use those forms of business? How does the corporate form differ from a ponzi scheme in such a way that we allow the one but forbid the other?
You aren't defending freedom. Well, you are defending the freedom of the powerful to oppress the less powerful. That results in a net loss of freedom, so you aren't really defending freedom at all. If a particular legal form results in a net loss of freedom, we deem it immoral and restrict others' ability to engage in that. Everyone has the right to defend themselves from aggression. Everyone has the right to band together to protect themselves from those with more power who would use it against them.
I say, corporations let the powerful more easily oppress other people, and we have every right to fight that. We have every right to limit what kinds of activities others engage in, when those activities hurt third parties. We do not have to give, oh let's just call them civil liberties, to arbitrary groups of people when the individuals making up those groups already hold those rights, as individuals.
Feel free to request more schooling from me any time, I'm happy to provide you with an education.
Limited liability is obviously not a prerequisite to doing business, quite a few sole proprietorships and partnerships still exist. There is an inherent moral hazard in absentee ownership. The hired managers do not, will not, and can not have the owners interests at heart to the same extent the owner would if they were managing their own business.
The question is, to what extent is this organizational and legal structure a benefit, to what extent is it a detriment, and how can we increase the benefits while decreasing the detriments. You've got some good ideas, I think transparency would help. People do, for the most part, want to do the right thing.
So, if the market is not supplying a needed public good, then it is up to government to supply it? We all benefit from good health care for all, making health care a public good. Therefore, according to Adam Smith's reasoning, government should provide health care.
You've actually reinforced my point about human nature. There is no one human nature, we all have different natures that are activated by different circumstance. We can't just say, 'People are selfish,' and stop our analysis there. We need to look for the circumstances that encourage selfishness. If human nature seems ugly, it is the system and not human nature that is to blame.
Modern economic research has shown that systematic changes can encourage or discourage selfish behavior. The most important aspect is the accessibility of justice. When people can punish unfairness in others, they will do so, and everyone will act with fairly and reciprocate. When people can not punish unfairness in others, they adopt selfishness themselves as a defense against being taken advantage of.
The question is, do we let the sociopaths dictate the rules of the game, or do we honor the bulk of humanities inbred sense of fairness?
Corporations aren't worse than governments, we, the people, just have less control over them. With government, at least we have mechanisms, available to all citizens, for controlling and directing the system. With corporations, most stakeholders have no control over the system. When government goes wrong, there is no one to blame but the citizens, in the end. When corporations go wrong, only the shareholders are ultimately to blame, not the customers, not the suppliers, and not the workers. Representative governments and corporations do share one particular moral hazard, though. They both institutionalize a managing class who's interests diverge from that of the other stakeholders.
No, no, no, falcon. Not 'this is what's wrong with the free market.' I said, 'this is what is wrong with a free market system of distributing justice. Those with money can buy it, those without can not.' It's kind of begging the question, not really saying anything. 'Justice for sale is bad because the rich can buy their own justice.'
I was responding to the fellow saying, 'this is what's wrong with the law.' What's wrong with the law is, not everyone has equal access to justice. You have to pay for justice, and if you can't pay, those who can will take it from you.
The thing is, modern economic research has shown we are not primarily self interested. People are more motivated by notions of fairness and reciprocity than by self interest. Well, most people. In the right circumstances.
Specifically, about 15% of the population is always 'good.' They act fairly, and reciprocate even if it hurts them. About five percent are always 'evil.' They will always take advantage. The rest of the population will do what everyone else is doing. If everyone is acting selfishly, they will too. If everyone is acting fairly, they will do that. Nobody likes being taken advantage of, so in a system that encourages selfishness, people will be, rather than being taken advantage of.
Google,'fairness reciprocity economic experiments' or look up 'game theory' and games like the dictator game, the ultimatum game, and the public goods game. There are others I can't remember off the top of my head, but that should give you a start in the right direction.
Remember, Adam Smith also said, "Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all. " and "It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion. "
I've been advocating for that penalty for a while. It's not like the actual business would disappear, or even the employees would get laid off, necessarily, the components of the corporation would be sold off to other, less evil companies.
Wrong again. Corporations have human rights. Did you even read the court decision I mentioned? No.
So you think corporations have a moral right to the same rights as us, after you say they don't have human rights. Make up your mind. Cognitive dissonance is keeping you from putting two and two together in your head. Good job catching my is/aught fallacy, but there was a reason corporations were so limited, they are an unchecked focus of power. People can use the corporate for to shield themselves from liability while amassing huge amounts of power over others.
A group is not a person, plain and simple. You are trying to argue that there is no difference between an individual and a collection of individuals. That's stupid.
Nice etymology, but 'to form into one body' means, 'to form a group' not 'to form an individual out of individuals.' Your personal wishes on the subject do not change the meaning of things.
In short, you've demolished nothing. You've formed no cognizant counter argument to my argument that corporations should not have human rights, in fact, you flat out support my argument by saying, "I'm not talking about "human rights", one must clearly be a human to have "human rights". " My argument, backed up by court documents pointed at through wikipedia, shows that corporations DO have human rights, and that this is a recent thing.
Does it hurt when you fail that badly? You got beaten by a social anarchist, boy. Schooled, even. Hope you enjoyed it.
Corporations benefit the rich and powerful. I'm neither. Any corporation I formed would not be very powerful, or well capitalized. But that's besides the point. The point is, the corporate form creates a moral hazard. Whether or not I can use it too, it is wrong.
There is absolutely nothing in the law that requires directors of large corporations to have their morals and ethics surgically removed, they just usually do so.
Why do they usually do so? I say, the system encourages it, even if not strictly required by law. We have a system that is predicated on the idea that humans are selfish creatures. We can be, but only when we see everyone around us being selfish. By starting from the assumption that people are selfish, our system creates the very problem it seeks to correct.
And what will you find in the prospectus of all modern megacorporations? Morals? No, you will find, "We exist to make money.'
Corporations are immortal psychopaths with no conscience and immense power. They allow individuals to profit without individual responsibility. People profit from actions they would find morally reprehensible, by investing in corporations that act in a morally repugnant fashion. Those investors sleep soundly at night, because someone else has made the decision to poison Bhopal, to employ children for sixteen hours a day in sweatshops, to murder union organizers. They didn't do it. Besides, EVERYONE is investing in corporations, so it must be all right, right?
No.
Corporations represent an unacceptable moral hazard. Not only do they let people profit without guilt from actions they would find morally repugnant, they create a manager class who have their own interests at heart, not the owners' interests. In fact, that manager class has done everything they can to enlarge the scope of corporate and managerial power and privilege, lobbying governments to change laws to favor corporations and the manager class. The corporation as we no know it comes from hundreds of years of this. Perhaps you should read a little bit about the history of corporations.
Wrong. The word corporation derives from the word corpus, meaning body, yes, but in this case, 'body' is used as a synecdoche to mean 'group.' Is the marine corps a person? Same derivation.
Corporations were not considered persons. They had no right to own stock in other corporations. They had legally limited life-spans. They could only operate where their charter said they could, doing the business the charter specified. And most importantly, until Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad in 1886, corporations did not have human rights. Interestingly, the decision about corporate personhood was not made by the Supreme Court justices, but by a law clerk who inserted his own opinion into the decision before publishing it. The Supreme Court had specifically said they were not deciding on the larger issue, yet somehow, it was decided. Odd, don't you think?
Your folk etymology of the word corporation and personal opinions on the subject do not add up to a valid argument. Perhaps you should read up on the history of corporations, as you seem to be deficient in factual knowledge of the subject.
Not much in the way of joint stock limited liability corporations before the the East India Company, was there? Maybe a few Dutch corporations. But I'd say, back to the early days of the US, when corporations like the EIC were seen as despotic enemies, and all corporations were limited to only perform the business for which they were chartered, could not own stock in other corporations, were limited in duration, were limited in geographic scope of business, and had no human rights as a legal person.
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In my experience, headhunters are very forthright about their desire to kill people, eat them, and hang their shrunken, stuffed heads from strings around their neck. Obviously, you should fire them if they look overly hungry and there is no one else for them to eat. Or if they catch and eat people other than those you hired them to catch and eat. Employed with care and attention, though, headhunters can bring something to your business that no other employee can: abject terror in those that oppose you.
Wrong, and disingenuous. If you were right, advertisers would not use techniques that appeal to emotions. Yet people go to school for years to learn those techniques, and they are taught very frankly, as ways of manipulating people through those emotions and insecurities. If you were right, advertisements would be simple lists of the features of products, and that is all. We both know that is not the case.
You might actually hit the mark that way.
You shit out the following piece of verbal diarrhea:
It is completely, thoroughly, and utterly impossible for an advertisement to make someone buy something against their will. It has never happened even once. And you know it. You pretend otherwise because you want to relieve yourself of the responsibility for your bad purchasing decisions and pretend the nasty marketers made you do it.
Let's analyze that. I don't make bad purchasing decisions. In fact, I purchase very little, preferring to invest my money. When I do make major purchases, I research from unbiased sources.
I don't see ads, ever. I filter them on the Internet, skip them on my Tivo, flip the page in magazines, and look away from signs. I take the free things that advertising provides and I spit in the advertisers face. They are fucking evil, manipulative con men.
My question to you is, if you are right, why do people pay for advertising? Of what use is it? Why, if it is only to tell us what is available so that we may make rational choices, do advertisers employ techniques that appeal to emotions, and not to logic? I think you know why. In fact, you probably went to school to learn all about it, didn't you?
Are you arguing that black criminals do more harm to society than white criminals? Or are you arguing that we simply can't compare the amount of damage done, and therefore it is as ludicrous to say that whites do more than blacks as it is to say that blacks do more than whites? Either way, I win the argument and OeLeWaPpErKe loses...
I did cover that aspect: "And because we keep blacks in second class positions through institutionalized racism, they do not have the same opportunities that the dominant whites do." But blacks use of drugs is targeted much more harshly than whites. Cocaine and crack are the same damn thing, yet crack, which is seen as a black person's drug, will get you longer mandatory sentences than the same amount of cocaine. Blacks are also far more likely to be stopped and searched than whites.
I find manipulation offensive. I'm not saying people should be forbidden to try it. But free speech works both way. That's its strength. We don't forbid people from joining the KKK and saying blacks are subhuman. We let them shout their idiocy to the world, and everyone else gets to call them racist antisocial idiots.
Well, advertisers are free to attempt to manipulate people and I'm free to say, manipulation is immoral. Are you arguing against my right to say that, or against the fact that manipulation is wrong?
You are either arguing that manipulation is good and desirable, or you are arguing that I should not be allowed to criticize manipulation. Which is it? Please, be as clear as possible.
Again, there is a difference between saying, people should be restricted from doing something, and saying, doing something is harmful and immoral and people who do it deserve no respect. I fully recognize your right to lie to me. But I refuse to respect you if you do. Understand?
I am not saying advertising and marketing should be forbidden, just that we should not respect those who engage in such a practice any more than we should respect other liars and con-men.
Let's break down your argument. I say,
I'm saying advertising is immoral, and that people should not support advertising or marketing because it is an attempt to get them to do things based on emotional manipulation.
and you reply,
Yes, we get that you're saying that, it's just that you're wrong. People have a right to attempt to pursuade others around to their point of view - it's a fundamental freedom.
You appear to be arguing that people should let themselves be manipulated because it is everyone's right to manipulate people. I'm saying, people should not let themselves be manipulated. Oh, they should not restrict anyone from trying, but they should make sure that all such dishonest efforts are a waste of time.
If a product is good, and suits my needs, I will buy it. Not because someone manipulated me into thinking the company that provides it is my best buddy. If you imply that a product will get me laid, or increase my social status, or you make other improbable claims for said product, I respect your right to lie like that, but I do not respect you for being a liar.
I'm saying advertising is immoral, and that people should not support advertising or marketing because it is an attempt to get them to do things based on emotional manipulation. I'm saying that moral individuals should not consider it an acceptable career. I'm saying we should point out to those who do it exactly what they are doing, and why it is wrong. I'm saying we should viciously mock anyone in the industry and that they should be accorded the respect we give all other con artists and frauds.
I'm NOT saying the government should restrict advertising. I'm saying, when these sick fucks attempt to justify their immoral actions, we should spit in their faces and tell them where they can shove it. They want to play at manipulation and mind control, fine. but they don't get to have my respect, or the respect of any decent people. Advertising or marketing, as a career, is a waste of a human life and creativity.
You know, you almost succeeded in diverting attention away from your initial argument and into a morass of conflicting definitions. Let me draw attention back to the your initial reply:
I must disagree with you. Corporations have always been persons. The word incorporate implies that. A person is merely a legal entity. If your neighbor's dog bites you, you can't sue your neighbor's dog, because the dog's not a person. You have to sue your neighbor.
Personhood is what obliges corporations to obey the law and by extension why they have rights.
This was in reply to my assertion:
Not much in the way of joint stock limited liability corporations before the the East India Company, was there? Maybe a few Dutch corporations. But I'd say, back to the early days of the US, when corporations like the EIC were seen as despotic enemies, and all corporations were limited to only perform the business for which they were chartered, could not own stock in other corporations, were limited in duration, were limited in geographic scope of business, and had no human rights as a legal person.
I have successfully showed that corporations have increased their rights, whether we use the terms 'human rights' 'personal rights' or 'civil liberties' is irrelevant. My point is that corporations were limited in their rights, and now they are not. It was never any sort of major point that corporations were considered 'persons' or not. The point is the encroachment of corporate power over individuals.
You attempt to defend this by likening corporations to slaves, which is ludicrous. You do not actually argue as to why it is good for corporations to have more rights. You do not actually argue as to why it was bad that their rights were limited. By comparing them to slaves, you attempt to engage emotions, not logic.
Let's define the parameters of this discussion more clearly so we are not sidetracked into little semantic games, okay?
It is my position that the extension of corporate rights is a bad thing. Let me list the specific limitations I think are positive:
1.) Corporations could not own stock in other corporations.
2.) Corportations could only do business as outlined in their charter.
3.) Corporations could only do business in the area outlined in their charter.
4.) Corporations had a limited lifespan (although this was never carried out in practice, so I mention it only for the sake of completeness.)
5.)Corporations had no right to free speech. Only individual humans did.
Now, these limitations did not in any way limit the rights of individuals. They limited the ability of groups of individuals to hold power over others. Granting corporations unlimited rights has allowed them to exert enormous amounts of power over each of our daily lives. This power comes without any sort of representation, and amounts to tyranny.
Now that I have made my points clear, perhaps you could attempt to discuss them rather than trying to throw the discussion off track with useless debates over semantics.
In their own minds, they are helping deliver valuable products that people enjoy, and informing them about their choices. Cognitive dissonance keeps them from thinking about what they are really doing. It keeps them from putting two and and two together. They went to school to learn mind control. In their own discussions they can be very frank about the fact that they want to control people and get them to do things that may be against their best interest, but they can not see that in moral terms they are doing something very, very wrong. They are planting false ideas in people's heads, making them believe that a company loves them, that a beer will make them sexy, that a pill will make their dicks bigger or their bellies smaller, that choosing the right products will make them popular and happy. They are preying on people's insecurities. And it works. If marketing were not capable of controlling people's actions, it would be useless.
You know, there is another class of goods that gets accused of controlling people's actions and making them do harmful things against their will: drugs. We can't even prove that drugs do this, while advertising would not be salable if it didn't. Why are drugs illegal but advertising is legal?
If you add up the monetary damages and the damage to people's lives, white crime is FAR bigger than black crime. Think white collar crime. The guys in charge in Bhopal were white. Think of all the millions of lives ruined over the years by corporate malfeasance. Sure, blacks are incarcerated at a far higher rate than whites but this is because we've criminalized the victimless crime of drug possession. And because police are more likely to stop and arrest a black person than a white person. And because we keep blacks in second class positions through institutionalized racism, they do not have the same opportunities that the dominant whites do.
You say such discussions are not possible, yet here we are having that discussion. You are exhibiting symptoms of paranoid delusion and severe cognitive dissonance.
A market can be made unfree by government decree, or by the actions of those in the market. A monopoly or monopsony is not a free market, for instance. A pump and dump scheme makes the market it is done in unfree, in that it no longer has the important and beneficial characteristics of a free market. Government intervention can actually make markets MORE free than if it were left up to the participants.
Interesting bit about the birth of insurance, but I'm not sure how accurate it is. In many states including mine, you can set up a pre-tax medical fund and pay for any medical expenses out of that, which kind of demolishes the main argument of the Time piece. But the insurance system is an oligopoly, not a free market, so you as an individual, even working with pre-tax money, do not have enough buying power to get a good deal. And the privately created barriers to entry into the insurance game ensure that nobody new can get in and ruin the entrenched player's profits.
Yes. We have the capacity for loving kindness and fairness, and we have the capacity for utter brutality. As my father is a noted psychologist, I grew up knowing about the Stanford experiment, the Milgram experiment, and many others. My point is that we can understand the conditions that lead people to treat others with fairness, and the conditions that lead people to treat people with brutality. We can increase the former conditions while limiting the later. Systems that lead people to act brutally are inefficient and unhealthy systems, while systems that lead people to act with loving kindness and fairness are efficient and healthy systems.
Health care is a type of good can't be fairly traded in a free market. The imbalance of information is simply too great, skewing the costs. It is also a public good, in that good health in others contributes to everyone's well being.
But more than that, providing health care to all is a moral issue. We are the only rich and powerful nation that does not see it as such. Every nation that has socialized health care framed it as a moral issue: letting the poor die is just wrong.
The only point of clarification I need to bring up here is that by 'most stakeholders' I was specifically excluding shareholders. The system is designed to let them exercise control. Oh sure, it's one share one vote not one person one vote like in a democracy. But stockholders have control, they are the owners. The workers, customers, suppliers and neighbors also all have a stake in the endeavor, but they have no representation in the decision making process.
Governments and businesses are no different in that you can only boycott them if you have an alternative. What Randy Weaver was trying to do was not a boycott, it was theft. He was taking the services of the government, like armed protection, roads, a legal system, and so forth, without paying for them. Try to do that to a corporation and see what happens. To boycott a government or a business, by definition, you need to leave the store and not partake of the goods and services. As far as I know, nobody was forcing Randy to stay in the US. He had the same freedom that some poor schub living in a company town and dealing with the company monopoly does: he could leave. Might not be easy, and there may not actually be any other options out there for him, but that is not the fault of the government or business itself, is it?
If I don't like the menu at McDonalds, but it is three in the morning and no place else is open, that does not give me the right to camp out in McDonalds and demand they feed me caviar for two cents a spoonful. If I don't like the country I'm in, but I like every other country even less, or can't get citizenship, that does not give me the right to demand that the country do things my way. Either stop voluntarily taking the goods and services offered, or shut the hell up.
What I mean is that every right granted to humans is, if applicable, granted to corporations. Political asylum is not a human right, at least, not everyone recognizes that just anyone has the right to it. And corporations have citizenship. They have all the protections that come along with citizenship. A corporation has a right to free speech. It can be discriminated against. It can hold property. Every right granted to US citizens is granted to corporations.
It did not used to be that way, a corporation could not own just any property, like stock in other companies. A corporation could not be slandered. It had no right to free speech. Oh, the individuals making up a corporation had all those rights, but the corporation itself did not. A person's right to free speech entitles them to lie to you. Fox News sued for their right to lie to us on the air, and won. Is that really a good thing?
A corporation is a tool for oppression. It is not a human held in slavery, it is slavery. We went from right to wrong, not the other way around, by giving corporations rights that people have when the people that make up a corporation already have those rights individually.
Your freedom ends when it infringes mine. You don't have the freedom to shit in my yard, you don't have the freedom to steal from me, your right to swing your fist ends with my face. Why do we make racketeering illegal? Why do we make conspiracy illegal? Why do we make Ponzi schemes illegal? Why do we take away people's freedoms to use those forms of business? How does the corporate form differ from a ponzi scheme in such a way that we allow the one but forbid the other?
You aren't defending freedom. Well, you are defending the freedom of the powerful to oppress the less powerful. That results in a net loss of freedom, so you aren't really defending freedom at all. If a particular legal form results in a net loss of freedom, we deem it immoral and restrict others' ability to engage in that. Everyone has the right to defend themselves from aggression. Everyone has the right to band together to protect themselves from those with more power who would use it against them.
I say, corporations let the powerful more easily oppress other people, and we have every right to fight that. We have every right to limit what kinds of activities others engage in, when those activities hurt third parties. We do not have to give, oh let's just call them civil liberties, to arbitrary groups of people when the individuals making up those groups already hold those rights, as individuals.
Feel free to request more schooling from me any time, I'm happy to provide you with an education.
Limited liability is obviously not a prerequisite to doing business, quite a few sole proprietorships and partnerships still exist. There is an inherent moral hazard in absentee ownership. The hired managers do not, will not, and can not have the owners interests at heart to the same extent the owner would if they were managing their own business.
The question is, to what extent is this organizational and legal structure a benefit, to what extent is it a detriment, and how can we increase the benefits while decreasing the detriments. You've got some good ideas, I think transparency would help. People do, for the most part, want to do the right thing.
So, if the market is not supplying a needed public good, then it is up to government to supply it? We all benefit from good health care for all, making health care a public good. Therefore, according to Adam Smith's reasoning, government should provide health care.
You've actually reinforced my point about human nature. There is no one human nature, we all have different natures that are activated by different circumstance. We can't just say, 'People are selfish,' and stop our analysis there. We need to look for the circumstances that encourage selfishness. If human nature seems ugly, it is the system and not human nature that is to blame.
Modern economic research has shown that systematic changes can encourage or discourage selfish behavior. The most important aspect is the accessibility of justice. When people can punish unfairness in others, they will do so, and everyone will act with fairly and reciprocate. When people can not punish unfairness in others, they adopt selfishness themselves as a defense against being taken advantage of.
The question is, do we let the sociopaths dictate the rules of the game, or do we honor the bulk of humanities inbred sense of fairness?
Corporations aren't worse than governments, we, the people, just have less control over them. With government, at least we have mechanisms, available to all citizens, for controlling and directing the system. With corporations, most stakeholders have no control over the system. When government goes wrong, there is no one to blame but the citizens, in the end. When corporations go wrong, only the shareholders are ultimately to blame, not the customers, not the suppliers, and not the workers. Representative governments and corporations do share one particular moral hazard, though. They both institutionalize a managing class who's interests diverge from that of the other stakeholders.
No, no, no, falcon. Not 'this is what's wrong with the free market.' I said, 'this is what is wrong with a free market system of distributing justice. Those with money can buy it, those without can not.' It's kind of begging the question, not really saying anything. 'Justice for sale is bad because the rich can buy their own justice.'
I was responding to the fellow saying, 'this is what's wrong with the law.' What's wrong with the law is, not everyone has equal access to justice. You have to pay for justice, and if you can't pay, those who can will take it from you.
The thing is, modern economic research has shown we are not primarily self interested. People are more motivated by notions of fairness and reciprocity than by self interest. Well, most people. In the right circumstances.
Specifically, about 15% of the population is always 'good.' They act fairly, and reciprocate even if it hurts them. About five percent are always 'evil.' They will always take advantage. The rest of the population will do what everyone else is doing. If everyone is acting selfishly, they will too. If everyone is acting fairly, they will do that. Nobody likes being taken advantage of, so in a system that encourages selfishness, people will be, rather than being taken advantage of.
Google ,'fairness reciprocity economic experiments' or look up 'game theory' and games like the dictator game, the ultimatum game, and the public goods game. There are others I can't remember off the top of my head, but that should give you a start in the right direction.
Remember, Adam Smith also said, "Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all. " and "It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion. "
I've been advocating for that penalty for a while. It's not like the actual business would disappear, or even the employees would get laid off, necessarily, the components of the corporation would be sold off to other, less evil companies.
Wrong again. Corporations have human rights. Did you even read the court decision I mentioned? No.
So you think corporations have a moral right to the same rights as us, after you say they don't have human rights. Make up your mind. Cognitive dissonance is keeping you from putting two and two together in your head. Good job catching my is/aught fallacy, but there was a reason corporations were so limited, they are an unchecked focus of power. People can use the corporate for to shield themselves from liability while amassing huge amounts of power over others.
A group is not a person, plain and simple. You are trying to argue that there is no difference between an individual and a collection of individuals. That's stupid.
Nice etymology, but 'to form into one body' means, 'to form a group' not 'to form an individual out of individuals.' Your personal wishes on the subject do not change the meaning of things.
In short, you've demolished nothing. You've formed no cognizant counter argument to my argument that corporations should not have human rights, in fact, you flat out support my argument by saying, "I'm not talking about "human rights", one must clearly be a human to have "human rights". " My argument, backed up by court documents pointed at through wikipedia, shows that corporations DO have human rights, and that this is a recent thing.
Does it hurt when you fail that badly? You got beaten by a social anarchist, boy. Schooled, even. Hope you enjoyed it.
Corporations benefit the rich and powerful. I'm neither. Any corporation I formed would not be very powerful, or well capitalized. But that's besides the point. The point is, the corporate form creates a moral hazard. Whether or not I can use it too, it is wrong.
There is absolutely nothing in the law that requires directors of large corporations to have their morals and ethics surgically removed, they just usually do so.
Why do they usually do so? I say, the system encourages it, even if not strictly required by law. We have a system that is predicated on the idea that humans are selfish creatures. We can be, but only when we see everyone around us being selfish. By starting from the assumption that people are selfish, our system creates the very problem it seeks to correct.
And what will you find in the prospectus of all modern megacorporations? Morals? No, you will find, "We exist to make money.'
Corporations are immortal psychopaths with no conscience and immense power. They allow individuals to profit without individual responsibility. People profit from actions they would find morally reprehensible, by investing in corporations that act in a morally repugnant fashion. Those investors sleep soundly at night, because someone else has made the decision to poison Bhopal, to employ children for sixteen hours a day in sweatshops, to murder union organizers. They didn't do it. Besides, EVERYONE is investing in corporations, so it must be all right, right?
No.
Corporations represent an unacceptable moral hazard. Not only do they let people profit without guilt from actions they would find morally repugnant, they create a manager class who have their own interests at heart, not the owners' interests. In fact, that manager class has done everything they can to enlarge the scope of corporate and managerial power and privilege, lobbying governments to change laws to favor corporations and the manager class. The corporation as we no know it comes from hundreds of years of this. Perhaps you should read a little bit about the history of corporations.
Wrong. The word corporation derives from the word corpus, meaning body, yes, but in this case, 'body' is used as a synecdoche to mean 'group.' Is the marine corps a person? Same derivation.
Corporations were not considered persons. They had no right to own stock in other corporations. They had legally limited life-spans. They could only operate where their charter said they could, doing the business the charter specified. And most importantly, until Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad in 1886, corporations did not have human rights. Interestingly, the decision about corporate personhood was not made by the Supreme Court justices, but by a law clerk who inserted his own opinion into the decision before publishing it. The Supreme Court had specifically said they were not deciding on the larger issue, yet somehow, it was decided. Odd, don't you think?
Your folk etymology of the word corporation and personal opinions on the subject do not add up to a valid argument. Perhaps you should read up on the history of corporations, as you seem to be deficient in factual knowledge of the subject.
Not much in the way of joint stock limited liability corporations before the the East India Company, was there? Maybe a few Dutch corporations. But I'd say, back to the early days of the US, when corporations like the EIC were seen as despotic enemies, and all corporations were limited to only perform the business for which they were chartered, could not own stock in other corporations, were limited in duration, were limited in geographic scope of business, and had no human rights as a legal person.