I've been thinking (in background mode; one of the things my brain chews on when I'm not using it for anything else) for several years now about the issue of "artificial persons".
The thing is, it's truly a bizarre concept to be able to create an artificial person; certainly, western civilization came to the idea fairly lately (say, the last half-millennium, roughly), and I don't think any of the other civilizations ever came up with the notion (although I'm not claiming definitive knowledge there; I could be wrong about other cultures' legal history). General incorporation laws (i.e., it doesn't take, literally, an act of congress or a state legislature to set up a corporation) are even more recent; a couple centuries at most.
The arguments in favor of easy incorporation and limited liability are certainly compelling ones; the benefits touted in civics classes are empirically real and substantial. At the same time, though, there are some real problems.
Corporations are much harder to punish than real people; you can't lock them up, and I have my doubts that the "death penalty" would work well either; the art of restructuring companies to diffuse or avoid responsibility was brought to a fine pitch of perfection by the early twentieth century. Fines sort of work, but unless they're so massive as to threaten the corporation's very existence, they don't seem to cause as much pain as a proportionate fine would cause a real person.
Corporations also seem to be strongly biased against having any moral sense. Yes, a strong senior executive can force a corporation to act morally sometimes. But the point is, s/he _has_ to force the behavior; it goes against the natural flow of corporate action. Left to themselves, corporations tend very strongly to be amoral sociopaths.
I don't have any magic wand to solve these problems, even if I were proclaimed Unquestioned World Dictator later this week, but they nag at me; there's got to be a way to keep most of the benefits while checking the worst of the drawbacks.
One thing that I think our current concept of a corporation has very wrong, from a social engineering standpoint, is that we start from the assumption that an "artificial person" has the same rights and privileges as a natural person, and then restrict them by law in an effort to control corporate behavior.
I think it would be better to start from the position that an artificial person has no rights or protections, none whatsoever, except as explicitly granted by law. That is, change the question from "what should corporations be prevented from doing" to "what should corporations be allowed to do".
So, in parallel with realinterrobang's comment about the death penalty, perhaps I'm in favor of slavery, as long as the slaves are corporations.
Btw, see this for an interesting read on the history of the notion of artificial people in English common law (from which American corporate law grew).
(no subject)
The thing is, it's truly a bizarre concept to be able to create an artificial person; certainly, western civilization came to the idea fairly lately (say, the last half-millennium, roughly), and I don't think any of the other civilizations ever came up with the notion (although I'm not claiming definitive knowledge there; I could be wrong about other cultures' legal history). General incorporation laws (i.e., it doesn't take, literally, an act of congress or a state legislature to set up a corporation) are even more recent; a couple centuries at most.
The arguments in favor of easy incorporation and limited liability are certainly compelling ones; the benefits touted in civics classes are empirically real and substantial. At the same time, though, there are some real problems.
Corporations are much harder to punish than real people; you can't lock them up, and I have my doubts that the "death penalty" would work well either; the art of restructuring companies to diffuse or avoid responsibility was brought to a fine pitch of perfection by the early twentieth century. Fines sort of work, but unless they're so massive as to threaten the corporation's very existence, they don't seem to cause as much pain as a proportionate fine would cause a real person.
Corporations also seem to be strongly biased against having any moral sense. Yes, a strong senior executive can force a corporation to act morally sometimes. But the point is, s/he _has_ to force the behavior; it goes against the natural flow of corporate action. Left to themselves, corporations tend very strongly to be amoral sociopaths.
I don't have any magic wand to solve these problems, even if I were proclaimed Unquestioned World Dictator later this week, but they nag at me; there's got to be a way to keep most of the benefits while checking the worst of the drawbacks.
One thing that I think our current concept of a corporation has very wrong, from a social engineering standpoint, is that we start from the assumption that an "artificial person" has the same rights and privileges as a natural person, and then restrict them by law in an effort to control corporate behavior.
I think it would be better to start from the position that an artificial person has no rights or protections, none whatsoever, except as explicitly granted by law. That is, change the question from "what should corporations be prevented from doing" to "what should corporations be allowed to do".
So, in parallel with
Btw, see
this for an interesting read on the history of the notion of artificial people in English common law (from which American corporate law grew).