Obviously.
Lets say a church goes bankrupt. Can its creditors knock on the door of any person who has ever put money in the plate? That is limited liability.
A church being owned by the parishoners is no different than a company being own by shareholders.
You can’t enslave capital.
We’re not talking about merely aknowledging the existance of an organization but giving it a special legal status and economic privilege. That’s what is at issue, and to construe it otherwise is deceptive.
You really don’t get individualist philosophy, do you Jon? You don’t get that words like “corporation”, “organization”, and “church” are just convenient shorthand for what is really just a long chain of a lot of individuals that shared similar beliefs, practices, or terms and passed what was effectively their property from one to the next. There is actually no Catholic Church. Well, there is one, several actually, but they’re just buildings. There are Catholics who choose to come together and call themselves a church. They establish certain hierarchies between themselves, but the only thing that’s real, the only thing that’s really there, is the people, the individual people. All collective nouns are convenient fictions, which ought have no moral standing of any sort in themselves.
Most of the collectivist nouns, such as business, is only falsely applied as a noun. You do not have a business, not really. You do business. You don’t have an organization, you organize with others. The result is not an entity, but an action maintained only by the will and effort of individuals. Our view of collective fictions as actual entities is a delusion, an insanity that has plagued us for centuries and has caused huge error and suffering. Government and nation are themselves collectivist “entities”, fictions, the most pernicious of all, to be sure, but not the only ones, and only the chiefs amongst the demons of the human mind with a vast array of lesser evil deceits which serve and feed off of them.
You’ve already stated that recognizing the Church’s ownership of property is a privilege.
Perhaps you elaborate on this “special” status and cure me of my ignorance.
Nonsense. Common ownership is fact.
Donating to clergy or for building maintenance does not imply partial ownership of the fictional entity that is the “church”. I can give you money for a service, it doesn’t mean I own part of you.
True enough. But buildings can’t actually incur debts (yes, I know you meant the fiction; that debt belongs to someone, not the fictional entity).
Cash ain’t capital, and neither are people. If I buy 10% of a tractor and demand 10% of the profits made with that tractor in return, I suppose that would work, but business itself is defined and embodied only by the people doing it.
True. We all own the land in common (in my opinion). However, we own it each as individuals. We do not own it as “humanity”. We may get together and start doing business, organizing as partners. We may each have 50% rights to a building. We may, for convenience, call our grouping a name, “Sharp and Dullard”, for instance, but we will truly be naming our continuing choice and action to work organized as partners. We have not thus established an entity.
Ownership is irrevelent to liability. I am not responsible for the damage I do with my car becauses I am its owner. If I do damage with a borrowed car I am still liable. If someone steals my car, I am not liable. If you really want to hold stockholders liable simply because they own the company you’re naive.
But I suspect the real reason you want to hold them liable is because of their role in creating(or profiting from) the company. In this way shareholders are no different from those who fund a church.
Ha.
And no person is prevented from quiting.
By the way, what happens when humans colonize other planets? Do all humans own Jupiter in common?
A side note. Can’t really hack it on the main point, can you? Collective entities don’t exist. You now appear to be merely holding your ears and singing “La la la”. Are you, like really devoted to the Catholic Church or something? Do you have a religious belief that demands you believe in fictitious entities that stem from mere intellectual laziness?
If someone steals your car, no, you are not liable. If you let them borrow your car, yes, you are. The driver will still be liable for whatever hijinks they did, but you will be liable for lending your car to someone who was unreliable. Lesson is, don’t lend your car to someone, even if the car has almost no value in and of itself, unless you really, really trust them.
Don’t ever just base an argument on a suspicion, or you will (as you do frequently and have here) just set up a strawman, and look either disingenous or a fool. Argue against exactly what I say, and let me correct myself if I stated things wrongly.
You would be wrong.
Again, OK. So what is your point? You have some sort of short in your logic circuit, friend.
No, you are not.
Too ineffective. Corporations don’t pay taxes; they collect taxes.
Legally fictional entities are entirely consistent with the free market. When you do business with an entity that is duly registered and has an “Inc.” or “Co.” in its name, you are agreeing to forego legal action against the individual shareholders in the event of a breach. If you don’t want to limit your remedies, then don’t do business with corporations. This legal arrangement would persist in an anarchist state, just as deeds to property, wills and trusts, etc. Contracts themselves are just pieces of paper in reality. For that matter, law itself is an abstract concept with no existence outside of people’s minds. The legal fictionhood of corporations does not mean they are invalid.
Here all firms must pay IRC (generally 25% on profits). We generally also call the police, municipe and stuff as corporations, but I guess because they are part of the state, they are exempt.
Crucial truth!!
You could have written into a contract that the person (you can only make contracts with real people) has their liability limited to a certain amount, but it must be explicit. You can’t just tack a “Co.” onto a name and hold me to those terms by it. “Duly registered” doesn’t mean crap to me, unless I somehow am already in a contract that includes such a recognition in it. Only governments can force you to recognize such registrations. Also, if your “corporation” does something at your direction that ends up causing me harm, for which you could be held liable, I can sue you directly unless I have some sort of explicit contract that says I can’t. In any case where no contract was existent, you are fully liable. You may have a contract with others which says they must cover your costs, but that means nothing for how I have to deal with you.
Contracts are just agreements between people. Laws are just principles which guide your actions. Both are principals, ways that entities agree to interact with one another. Neither purports to be entities in and of themselves. Corporations do, and this is a falsehood.
Here are your choices:
You can live in an anarchist city-state and enjoy the high living standards of a complex economy where risk-spreading mechanisms such as corporations, mutual insurers, trusts, etc. enjoy the protection of their wealthy and well-armed merchant class patrons.
You can move out to that non-arable land nobody wants where on a good day you and all the other radical individualists may be able to kill enough squirrels to render into a stew. In the event a traveling salesman happens along the dirt path in front of your hovel, you can haul out your 10,000 page Contract Between Me Individually And All The Rest Of Creation and see if he’ll agree to it.
Corporations enable impersonal exchange. Without legal constructs such as corporations, you can only do business with people in a tightly-knit social network such as family, like in southern Italy, Mexico, etc. The fact that abstract concepts are accepted and enforced means there’s a rule of law the merchant class can rely upon. This is why the West enjoys high living standards and the Third World has flat, inefficient economies where nobody can trade outside their network. And who’s going to invest in things like mass production and rail lines if they know their $10K investment will render them liable for somebody losing their leg a thousand miles away?
How many squirrels does it take to make a good stew? Can I substitute or mix raccoons?
LOL, Priceless!! Absolutely well said.
Which explains perfectly why governments borrowed from private common law procedures for much of their laws, doesn’t it? I agree that a stable system of law and order is necessary for a prosperous economy and even society in general, but I disagree that governments are necessary to create such law and order. If anything, the more goverment we get, the less order we have and the more chaos we seem to have.