Yesterday on FTL a caller said she thought corporations were the same as states. The hosts went back and forth about it, but kind of agreed, however, I was amazed that no one mentioned the main difference. Violence!
States use violence and the threat of it for everything they do. Do corporations? Pretty big difference…
Why are they the same as States?
Historically speaking, a corporation is a body politic that is ‘commissioned’ into existence by a higher authority, for a stated purpose; more commonly called their “commission”. The original 13 colonies that declared independence from Britain were corporations, as sub-organizations of the British crown.
Today, a corporation refers to a group of people professionally associated with each other, who are employed to further the “mission” of the corporation; but that same organization doesn’t have a single owner, and are “commissioned” by the state or federal government. As creations of the state, they are subject to it’s laws in a way that supposed to be greater than an individually owned company; but in practice the regulations extend to all companies, so just about every company becomes a corporation (by choice) in order to benefit from the favorable tax rules.
So yes, they are very similar to governments; because they draw their presumed authority from government. The distinction regarding a monopoly on violence in the state is only a matter of the state, being the “higher power” in this relationship, denies such power to those corporations; not that those corporations wouldn’t act like the government if they could get away with it.
Good points. The corporation is a state-created thing given special protections by the state. For example, a corporation is also a ‘person’ according to state law (which is ridiculous.) Remove the state and there are no corporations… just businesses competing in a free and even free market.
So once again it’s the state that has created the problem…
Anyway, to me they still seem nothing alike… Saying they would use violence if they could get away with it is the same as saying my neighbor would use violence if he could get away with it. Where we have the possibility of Justice, my neighbor can’t get away with it, hence he doesn’t do it. It’s the same for Corporations… but who mitigates Justice for them? The state. While they can’t do violence (because the state wants to keep that monopoly), they get away with more injustice thanks to their special state-law protectionism.
@Codrus “Corporate personhood” is just a short metaphor to quickly describe the practical result of all the legaleze. It’s ridiculous to consider a corporation to be a legal person, and lawyers know that is true; but the powers bestowed upon the corporation by government have the net result that a corporation is, in effect, a rich & immortal person who can direct employees to do pretty much anything. Employees, acting as the representative of the corporation (in the same sense that a lawyer represents his client) can enter into contracts, pay bills, etc.
The real problem is that the corporation has no moral compunction of it’s own; only the moral limits of the employees that work there. The Iron Law of Bureaucracy guarantees that, within a generation, the corporation will be captured by those who are least likely to have any moral limit; only the concern of public scrutiny of their actions drawing the ire of the state, or the loss of market share.
So while we can currently depend upon the corporation’s desire for profit to prevent it from openly screwing over the public, in part because there’s always another corporation ready to take their market share; I strongly question the idea that, should the state vanish tomorrow; the largest & most powerful of these corporations wouldn’t be fighting to become the next state by Tuesday.
If the state vanished, so too its protectionist laws (not to mention the laws that allow the abstraction)… so there’d just be companies competing in the free market.
@Codrus That’s just my point. If the existing governments would vanish tomorrow, and everyone could tell, there’d be some (not all) of these major corporations fighting to become the new state by Tuesday; the free market be damned.
These CEO’s don’t care a whit about the free market, or any notion of capitalism; they’re all Keynesians. Maybe the original founders of these massive corporations did care, maybe not; but it doesn’t matter, as those guys are long dead. The Iron Law of Bureaucracy cannot be avoided, it affects every organization older than a generation. It even infected the Libertarian Party, an organization that is officially opposed to such things.
You’re getting lost in abstractions. While abstractions can be a useful tool, this is the danger of them. To paraphrase quickly you say ‘if the existing govts vanished … some corporations would start…’. But with the state gone, so went the corporations… there are only businesses left.
And a business will never say, ‘the market be damned!’ Not if it wants to see next week since that’s where its revenue is from! If the market says ‘no!’, what does a business have? Nothing. The market is everything or they are insolvent.
I don’t see the O’Reilly Autoparts or the Burger franchise trying–or even wanting–to be a new state. So what businesses might? A mercenary or security service business might, like perhaps the former Blackrock. But what are they going to do? They have ~17,000 employees, a tiny fraction of that militant, what are they going to do? Where are the paychecks coming from? If the people aren’t having it (what was the reason the state went extinct in the first place? The only way, I see is the people have had enough being victimized) and that’s reflected in the market, what is that group going to do? What can they do? Where’s the money coming from to do it?
They’re welcome to try, but really, if the people aren’t having it, what can they do? Let’s hear the plan.
You’re getting lost in abstractions. While abstractions can be a useful tool, this is the danger of them
I can see your point, Codrus; and I mostly agree with you. I’m just trying to point out that such corporations are not, automaticly, trustworthy.
And a business will never say, ‘the market be damned!’ Not if it wants to see next week since that’s where its revenue is from! If the market says ‘no!’, what does a business have? Nothing. The market is everything or they are insolvent.
Um, some have almost used that phrase. But I will get into the actual corporations that I’d fear the most from soon…
I don’t see the O’Reilly Autoparts or the Burger franchise trying–or even wanting–to be a new state. So what businesses might?
Let’s start with the largest government contractors…
Lockheed Martin Corp.
Boeing Co.
Raytheon Technologies Corp.
General Dynamics Corp.
Northrop Grumman Corp.
Pfizer Inc.
McKesson Corp.
Leidos Holdings Inc.
Huntington Ingalls Industries Inc
Moderna Inc
And then the top 10 list of information tech companies with government contracts…
Leidos Holdings Inc.
General Dynamics Corp.
Dell Technologies Corp.
Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corp.
L3Harris Technologies Inc.
Peraton Intermediate Holdings Corp.
Science Applications International Corp.
Raytheon Technologies Corp
Accenture PLC
CACI International Inc.
How many of these corporations have you ever heard of? Some of them, certainly. But these two sets of lists of corporations are unique, in the sense that government(s) are their only customers. The are by and for government, and if our government were to vanish tomorrow, their ‘market’ as it is would cease to exist. Some of them would simply fold up, certainly; but these are not run by normal people, so one or two of them might decide to “pivot” from servicing governments to becoming one.
People can want and desire anything… whether it is realistically attainable is entirely another matter…
True, but I not arguing that they could succeed, only that they’d try; and in trying cause a great deal of harm. Be careful of which you wish for.
That’s like saying slaves attempting to free themselves is going to cause a great deal of harm, so be careful what you wish for…
Seriously? So, victims making choices to stop being victims will lead to a great deal of harm? So better not do it? That’s your stand?
No, of course that’s not my stand. My stand is don’t put your faith in corporations to behave honorably when the time comes.
Why would I put my faith in an abstraction to behave honorably? Abstractions don’t exist in reality; human beings exist in reality.
We can predict what people will do based on the incentives and disincentives which are clearest in a free market. The incentives and disincentives in a state all point in unhealthy directions while in a free market they all point in healthy directions.
Those that note this fact know where to place their bets.