Jesus Christ. Only on Hacker News can one find a criticism of corporate personhood in which the complaint is that it doesn't grant corporations enough rights.
Corporations don't have rights. I understand that the law says they do: I'm saying the law is wrong. Rights are an inalienable thing granted to entities that have feelings, needs, the ability to experience joy and suffering, etc. You know what a person is: don't embarrass yourself by pretending you don't.
The entire purpose of capitalism is that it's supposed to result in the best results for people. Supposedly, competition will bring us the best products possible at the lowest price possible, while fairly rewarding people for their contributions. The entire point of this is to serve people: real, human people. Corporations exist to serve people, and if they fail to serve that purpose, they don't deserve to exist.
Some might argue that corporations are made up of people, and therefore corporate personhood is an approximation of representing those humans' rights, but that's a horribly inaccurate approximation of the truth. The majority of the people--real humans with rights--who make up most corporations, are workers, who are granted no power to speak on behalf of the corporation or choose what the corporation does. This means that when you treat the corporation as an entity with rights and responsibilities, you disproportionately concentrate the benefits of being a human in the people who are in charge of the corporation, who are then able to selfishly concentrate all the responsibilities--and punishments for not fulfilling those responsibilities--in the workers. This is why corporate personhood exists: because it allows a small segment of society to use the rights of humans to take actions while receiving none of the consequences if those actions are harmful, instead hiding behind limited liability and offloading the consequences onto workers and diverse pools of shareholders, some of whom had no visibility into the actions taken and too few shares to meaningfully make decisions.
And in fact, because certain aspects of corporate personhood don't make any sense, corporations have more rights than people. Slavery isn't illegal in the US: if you commit a crime, you can be forced to work in prison for no pay. But when corporations commit crimes, they usually get fines. If an individual knowingly sold an exploding car to someone and that person died, the seller would trivially go to jail. But when Ford did this, they paid damages. And incidentally, the decision to do this was made by people--people with human responsibility to not commit murder/manslaughter--and none of these people ever went to jail, either.
I'm going to say it again: corporations don't have rights. And corporations are harming people, who do have rights, on a massive scale. Whatever the law says, we have no ethical obligation to treat corporations with anything other than outright malice. As long as you don't harm any person, harming a corporation is a victimless act. And often, harming corporations helps more humans than it harms.
An auto mechanic may or may not agree to fix my car, but he never gets any say over where I may drive. Why should a worker have control over a corporation that belongs to other people? I’m a vendor and I vote with my feet.
> An auto mechanic may or may not agree to fix my car, but he never gets any say over where I may drive.
True, but irrelevant.
> Why should a worker have control over a corporation that belongs to other people?
Why should those other people be rewarded if they aren't contributing anything? I thought capitalism was about rewarding contributions?
To be clear, buying up all the means of production and withholding it from society unless they pay you rent isn't a contribution to society. It's creating artificial scarcity.
Factories aren’t cheap and they don’t age well. Datacenters probably go obsolete even faster. Someone had to put a lot of money at risk in return for uncertain future profits, and it wasn’t me. I can walk away with all the paychecks I banked whether they succeed or fail.
I think this is why worker-owned co-ops don’t outperform; ideologically they over-index on sweat equity and are reluctant to pay the market price for the capital they need from outside their own membership.
> Factories aren’t cheap and they don’t age well. Datacenters probably go obsolete even faster. Someone had to put a lot of money at risk in return for uncertain future profits, and it wasn’t me. I can walk away with all the paychecks I banked whether they succeed or fail.
Ah yes, as if investing your time and building a life dependent on income that can be taken away at any time isn't a risk.
I have no problem with people being compensated for lending, but stocks are like a loan with no endpoint, where you can just refuse to let the person pay you back and demand them pay you interest forever. At some point, you have to admit that the initial risk has been compensated and shareholders are no longer contributing.
> I think this is why worker-owned co-ops don’t outperform; ideologically they over-index on sweat equity and are reluctant to pay the market price for the capital they need from outside their own membership.
"Don't outperform" is a nice way of rephrasing the fact that they don't underperform either, which is what you would expect if worker ownership was really a problem.
If I agree to an upper limit on profit after which I have no ownership, I’m buying a bond or note rather than a share. Bond investors want low risks and expect to be paid back reliably on schedule or you could be forced into bankruptcy. It’s a bad fit for a startup facing a lot of unknowns.
Does a co-op do anything more effectively to make up for limited access to capital? It sounds like dividing a smaller pie.
> If I agree to an upper limit on profit after which I have no ownership, I’m buying a bond or note rather than a share.
Yes, I know. I'm saying that stocks are a tool that allows people to continue leeching off society far beyond the point where they've been fairly rewarded for their initial contributions.
> Bond investors want low risks and expect to be paid back reliably on schedule or you could be forced into bankruptcy. It’s a bad fit for a startup facing a lot of unknowns.
That's a pretty large generalization which is incorrect in many cases. Bond terms and risk levels can vary quite wildly.
> Does a co-op do anything more effectively to make up for limited access to capital? It sounds like dividing a smaller pie.
Compensates and otherwise treats its workers fairly. It's worth noting that not all incentives are monetary.
Corporations don't have rights. I understand that the law says they do: I'm saying the law is wrong. Rights are an inalienable thing granted to entities that have feelings, needs, the ability to experience joy and suffering, etc. You know what a person is: don't embarrass yourself by pretending you don't.
The entire purpose of capitalism is that it's supposed to result in the best results for people. Supposedly, competition will bring us the best products possible at the lowest price possible, while fairly rewarding people for their contributions. The entire point of this is to serve people: real, human people. Corporations exist to serve people, and if they fail to serve that purpose, they don't deserve to exist.
Some might argue that corporations are made up of people, and therefore corporate personhood is an approximation of representing those humans' rights, but that's a horribly inaccurate approximation of the truth. The majority of the people--real humans with rights--who make up most corporations, are workers, who are granted no power to speak on behalf of the corporation or choose what the corporation does. This means that when you treat the corporation as an entity with rights and responsibilities, you disproportionately concentrate the benefits of being a human in the people who are in charge of the corporation, who are then able to selfishly concentrate all the responsibilities--and punishments for not fulfilling those responsibilities--in the workers. This is why corporate personhood exists: because it allows a small segment of society to use the rights of humans to take actions while receiving none of the consequences if those actions are harmful, instead hiding behind limited liability and offloading the consequences onto workers and diverse pools of shareholders, some of whom had no visibility into the actions taken and too few shares to meaningfully make decisions.
And in fact, because certain aspects of corporate personhood don't make any sense, corporations have more rights than people. Slavery isn't illegal in the US: if you commit a crime, you can be forced to work in prison for no pay. But when corporations commit crimes, they usually get fines. If an individual knowingly sold an exploding car to someone and that person died, the seller would trivially go to jail. But when Ford did this, they paid damages. And incidentally, the decision to do this was made by people--people with human responsibility to not commit murder/manslaughter--and none of these people ever went to jail, either.
I'm going to say it again: corporations don't have rights. And corporations are harming people, who do have rights, on a massive scale. Whatever the law says, we have no ethical obligation to treat corporations with anything other than outright malice. As long as you don't harm any person, harming a corporation is a victimless act. And often, harming corporations helps more humans than it harms.