Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

So if, as Mitt Romney famously put it^[1], "corporations are people," and the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution has banned slavery here since the end of 1865 ... doesn't that suggest that corporations cannot be owned?

OT1H, these entities exist and could continue to function once liberated from their bondage, but with all their earnings staying in their own treasuries instead of being payed out as dividends, and without the ability to raise more capital by selling off shares of themselves, or anybody else having the ability to make money by speculating and trading part-ownership of slave-corporations ... OTOH, if they cannot be owned, that removes one set of incentives for creating new ones (nonprofits of various stripes would still continue to be born ... er, chartered, I presume).

Hmm. Taking this idea a little farther, it seems like it would abolish the all-too-common scenario of a corporation being acquired solely for the purpose of dismantling it to sell its assets for a profit (putting most of its employees out of work in the process). And the current avenue for becoming "too big to fail"^[2] -- not steady growth of one's business through successful competition for customers, but mergers and acquisitions -- would be closed off: corporations wishing to merge would have to marry^[3], instead of one buying the other. (And would anti-bigamy laws thus impose an upper limit on growth-by-merger?)

Of course, it does raise issues like what happens when a corporation dies (or is executed by the State for some crime) intestate. Then again, it would simplify some things if corporations could run for office on their own, transparently, instead of effectively buying politicians as they do now (though apparently Murray Hill, Inc got shot down in its bid to enter the Republican primary for Maryland's 8th District).

And yes, this notion that I'm floating as a thought-exercise is fundamentally anti-capitalist, since (as I, a non-economist and half-assed history student, understand it) the whole idea of legal-personhood for corporations came about as a result of the industrial revolution and as a mechanism for capitalism to function. So a corporate-abolitionist movement would be fundamentally radical (as in shaking our society's fundaments), however simply I've painted it in my opening paragraph.

[1] He didn't invent the idea of personae ficta, of course, but this quarter it's difficult to refer to that legal doctrine without remembering his voice explaining to a heckler that "Corporations are people, my friend ... of course they are."

[2] AKA too big for the economy to be able to afford to allow them to exist, due to the magnitude of the fallout if one should fail after all.

[3] As several other people have already pointed out would be a logical extrapolation of their personhood.