You begged the question. Why should fictional entities not own anything?
I appreciate the understanding here, and I do indeed have some sympathy with the owner of the incorporated liquor store. I think that, practically speaking, this is not a person or property that should be a target of revolutionary violence. That being said (and the Christians, I hope, will forgive me for using their terminology), that the world is ruled by the Devil does not justify your alliance with him, it just increases the penalty of not doing so. You took the bargain, and the price was your ultimate right over what was once yours. It is simple and unfortunate.
Because you have no right to force the acknowledgement of fictional entities as having rights, or even acknowledgement of their existence in the first place.
What precisely makes them fictional? Do not talk about current-law, but in general.
They attempt to define a collective activity as an individual entity independent of its consitutents.
Not that I’m aware of. Perhaps you could demonstrate this.
I guess I’m still basing my definition of a corporation on the modern legal one. What is your definition of a corporation?
No, I’d rather wait for your demonstration, if it’s all the same to you.
It’s not, but alright: A corporation is a legal entity established by a government-approved charter by which all are compelled to respect this legislative fiction as a person, with many of the rights of human person, despite the fact that it exists only on paper and in people’s minds. I have no objection to any contractual obligation you might wish to do business under, but only that you use the power of government to force others to obey the terms of that contractual arrangement who were not parties to the contract. Ultimately, property must be held by actual, physical persons, or it is held by literally no one.
Let’s say you sign a corporate charter; implicit or explicit in incorporation is the legal status of corporate assets belonging to the unitary and personified corporation itself, not the shareholders. Like any person, the corporation exists independent of these assets, but is seen as having ultimate rightful control: ownership. You take this step for the protections it affords; under the current legal environment, or any compatible with this step, it is advantageous for you.
Now, when I steal from the corporate person, because I don’t see it as a person, a couple things can happen. The corporation can try to sue me, but that unless I’m compelled to do so I have no more reason to see it as a person with a right to sue than I do to see it as a person with a right to own. You can try to sue me, but I didn’t steal your shares, which is the only thing you actually own, but the assets of the corporate person. You trying to sue me is trying to have your cake and eat it too. Or, you could let it go, but because you insist on everyone adhering to your madness regarding fake people having rights, you likely won’t.
Does this “demonstrate” it? Where do you differ?
But it doesn’t have to be government-established, does it.
And what sort of idiocy makes you presume that the property isn’t held by the owners and merely have listed it as belonging to the “corporation” for business purposes? It’s really nothing more than an ALIAS, when you get right down to it.
So if you steal from a corporation you’re stealing from “John Doe and Richard Roe under the alias of XYZ Corporation”, in essence.
Hope that helps you rid yourself of your leftist hatred of corporations.
When corporations are no more than aliases for their owners, then that’s fine. Until such a time, however, their existence remains as an extension of state power and is demonstrably different in nature than an alias. Your version of a corporation is not the definition of a corporation as it exists today.
JC, I appreciate your efforts to respond to the criticisms in this thread.
Regardless of other arguments, I do not feel there is a clear enough cut definition of whom it is ok to perpetuate property destruction against, and who is not. In every business, some amount of state participation (through licensing, regulation, payroll tax collection etc) is involved.
If there was a guiding principle, a yes/no answer to “can we vandalize” then I might be persuaded.
In my experience, the libertarian-ish complaints about corporation are almost universally uninformed. I go into this in In Defense of the Corporation, but take your example. Is this a case of contract, or tort? If contract, as Hessen has shown, there is no problem: those who deal with the company do so under the condition they can only sue for a certain limited set of assets. Now, if you enter a store that is owned by a corporation, I believe this can be viewed as a contract not tort.
But even if it’s tort, then the assumption that the current situation is government privilege is again very confused an uninformed. Under the law, a victim of tort can always sue the individual who negligently harms him–the tortfeasor. If the guy stocking the shelves did it negligently and you are harmed, and this is a tort, you can sue that person–whether he’s the manager or stockboy of a corporation or sole proprietorship.
Corporate limited liability laws state that the shareholders are only liable up to the value of their shares-what they. Now, if the shareholder were normally liable for torts and the law exempted them, that would be unlibertarian. But should the shareholder be liable for torts committed by an employee of a corporation that they own a share in? Why? A theory of causal responsibility is needed. No one has even shown that the company/employer ought to be responsible for the acts of the employee–that is, that the doctrine of respondeat superior is valid. In my view the managers who direct a tort to be performed by an underling are responsible. And modern corporate laws do not prevent this. Should shareholders be? Why? A shareholder might not even have given money to the company–he may have bought the share from another shareholder. So all he has is a right to (a) receive dividends, and a pro-rata share of assets if the company liquidates; and (b) to vote for directors; the directors hire managers; the managers hire and manage other employees. The shareholder role is very limited; if he is liable, then why not creditors, employees, vendors, suppliers, even customers?–they all support and help influence the corporation’s decisions. In any event, if a given shareholder is causally responsible for the tort performed by an employee of a corporation the shareholder owns stock in, I do not think corporate law limits their liability. The truth is that shareholders are simply not liable in the first place for torts of others, and should not be, absent special circumstances.
Moreover, even if they were, so what? Most of them don’t have enough personal assets to help satisfy a big verdict; and if it’s small, the corporation will pay it anyway and indemnify the shareholder if he is liable; and the shareholder would in any event probably have insurance, and even if he doesnt’, the corporation usually would. So this is all academic anyway. The entire attack on corporations is based on ignorance and resentment.
Which is actually the basis of my argument against your corporate property is unowned argument.
You claim that the shareholders own a piece of the ‘individual entity’ that is somehow separate from its constituents parts and therefore they don’t own any of the constituent parts. The constituent parts are unowned and open to homesteading because they are owned by a ‘fictitious person’ who can’t own property because they are, well, fictitious.
What you have failed to show is how someone loses ownership rights in the constituents parts by believing that they own a share of the whole.
And your whole chain of logic to justify theft and violence;
- The State is the debil
- Corporations are chartered by the state
- Corporations are the debil
Yep. And by their logic, since the state issues people social security numbers, they are “chartered by” the state and have no rights.
No, my chain is thus:
- People who invest in a corporation know that that corporation has assets to which they have no ownership rights. It’s part of the standard agreement. They do this because they expect to benefit, in one way or another, from this transaction.
- The entity they think owns the property in their name does not actually exist.
- They have ceded control to a fiction, knowingly. They have bought/created shares of a fictional entity. None of the rest of us are obligated to acknowledge that entity as legitimate. That they were foolish enough to sign away their property to a lie (and a palm of silver), is unfortunate, but no one made them do it. They had a right to cede ownership. They have no right to make the rest of us respect the fiction to which they ceded it.
Are my motives pure? No! I resent the corporate magnates, the rich and the powerful, those who have played this little socialist tyranny of ours the best and the longest. I am young, and a wageslave, and I see above me terribly powerful figures in whose interest the world is held, as hard as possible, to the status quo, limiting competition, so that for most the only way to support yourself is working for the wealth of some asshole who happened to have this or that piece of property. But I don’t advocate destroying the property they sometimes call theirs just because I want to. I can, because they opened the door by stating they did not own the corporate assets, that only the corporation owned it.
Kinsella, talk about how a shareholder has no more power over the actions of a corporation than an major creditor or important customer. That may be so, but a neither a creditor nor a customer has a claim against you if you damage the corporation’s property, as you seem to think a shareholder does. That a shareholder enters into a foolish arrangement in which they have little control over actions for which they could be held liable, that is their own madness.
You say that it is managers that control employees, not the shareholders who hire them. But just hiring someone to perform your responsibilities for you should not exempt you if you choose poorly. Perhaps, you might say, they can have a clause in the contract that the manager must pay all damages in case of a suit that would normally affect the shareholder. Very well, but the one bringing the lawsuit is no party to your contract. If the damages exceed the manager’s ability to pay, the shareholders should still be liable.
Finally, tacking a couple letters onto the end of your name like “Inc.” or “Corp.” should not constitute an implied contract. What a bunch of nonsense. All contracts should be explicit; aught else is a swindle. If you come to me and say, “Oh, no, you agreed not to sue me directly because there’s an Inc. behind my name” I’ll laugh in your face. You can’t obligate the general population to know of the special immunities you claim based on a few damned letters. Anarchism, remember?
A lot of this would be academic in a true anarchy anyway. Production, commerce, and justice would all be rendered so local and personal that these would be reduced to quibbles. But, as it stands right now, no human owns corporate property. And only humans can own.
I am not sure exactly what you are trying to say. The question is why should shareholders be liable for the torts of others? Any more than others with diffuse and distant influence over the company’s policies and actions? I don’t think customers, creditors, or even shareholders have any claims against those that damage the corporation. What are you talking about?
It’s the other way around. If employee A harms a third party, A is surely liable (as he is now under current law). To hold any other person or entity (such as his employer) responsible for A’s torts requires some other rationale. The common law doctrine of respondeat superior says the employer is vicariously liable for the torts committed by his employees during the scope of their employment. I have yet to see even this doctrine justified under libertarian theory, though perhaps it can be. But this only means the employer, or maybe the supervisors/managers, are liable also. Directors too? I doubt it, in most cases. Shareholders? No. Creditors? Not usually. Customers, suppliers, contractors? Probably not, usually. The connection is too tenuous.
Why? If a given shareholder didn’t commit the tort, why should he be liable? You need to expalin why he should be liable in the first place.
This is utter nonsense. A contract is jsut a way of transferring title to property. Of course it need not be written or explicit, or even verbal at all. In any event, this is pettifogging. If for some bizarre reason “Inc.” or “Corp.” were to be held insufficient notice, then corporations could easily adopt explicit little notices or contracts for all their dealings with customers, vendors, creditors, and so on–and I’m sure you anti-corporate types would find something to nitpick about this too.
The suit is either for a contractual claim, or a tort. A tort is committed by a person or persons; they can be sued directly. iF you want to sue others beyond the direct tortfeasor (say, if you want to sue not only the negligent FedEx truck driver who crashed into you, but alos his boss, or his employer, or the shareholders who own shares in that employer), you need to establish some rationale for why these other people should be liable for the torts of the driver. For contracts–this is easy, as Hessen has definitively shown.
Production would be local? Silly.
I own a few shares in a couple evil corporations.
They send me a quite detailed account of their assets and liabilities every three months or so and I know full well that I own a miniscule part of that and not a piece of the independent whole.
When Enron tanked they would have sent me a check for my portion of whatever was left of the burning hulk after all their liabilities were paid, I actually believe they did to the tune of $0.03 or something like that.
The only ‘fiction’ is your belief that ownership of the whole doesn’t entail one to ownership of the pieces.
What, you think every small town is going to be able to finance a couple billion dollar microchip fabrication plant or own and maintain the portion of the rail line that runs through town?
You must be one of those anarcho-primitivists or something?
A person is the ultimate rightful controller of that which that person owns. That is the definition of ownership. They are responsible for injuries caused by the property, whether it is they that directly employ/control it or their agents. Putting layers of employees between yourself and your property does not diminish your responsibility. The tenuousness of your control is no one’s doing but your own; it is foolish to take ownership of, thus responsibility for, something you can’t actually control. Unless, of course, you count on government to allow you to collect the benefits of ownership without just risk. Then, as long as you’ve made your devil’s bargain properly, its not foolish, just evil.
What is silly is the idea that the modern model of massive, centralized production could actually survive in an environment where transportation costs are not subsidized and land cannot be seized “for the public good”. What is silly is thinking that a person could actually afford the risk of allowing such remote agency to handle his property if he is rightly held fully responsible for abuses or negligence with it. There are a lot of other silly things about the idea that modern, massive corporations, or anything like them, could survive without intense partnership with the powers of government, but it’s late and I’m tired.
It’s not just a whole, it’s taken to be a person, and they accrue the benefits as such. Let them suffer the consequences of it, too.
Lotta good that’ll do them if some stubborn old grandma who lives just outside of town decides she doesn’t like X, Y, or Z coming from the plant, and shuts down that portion of the track which is on her land. You have to be able to build, maintain, and aquire a lot of track or road for centralized production. How will you do it without forcefully removing some people’s property rights? Only by stealing land have we ever managed to get cross-continental railroads or interstates.