[HN Gopher] Corporate insecthood (2022)
___________________________________________________________________
Corporate insecthood (2022)
Author : zdw
Score : 43 points
Date : 2023-02-11 15:36 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (psyarxiv.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (psyarxiv.com)
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| This citation style is so distracting. Everyone should just use
| Chicago style [1] from now on. Map a subtle little number to a
| footnote that I can read at my leisure.
|
| [1] source-author, year; another-source-author, year; maybe my
| own ramblings; keep this verbose crap out of the text so I can
| better read/skim it.
| low_tech_punk wrote:
| In a dreamland, all papers are digitized; everyone can use
| inline hyperlinks as citation; and all URLs are archived for
| stable public access.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| Some sites I've seen have a habit of following any outside
| link with an archive version of that same link (typically
| either the wayback machine or archive.today).
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I think the original formation of a corporation as a means to
| conduct a joint _enterprise_ is instructive - that the idea of a
| legal "person" is at odds with its infinite duration. Most if
| not all issues with corporations (institutional capture, etc) can
| be solved by putting a fixed lifetime on an organisation and
| returning the capital to investors after say two or three
| decades.
|
| I mean Google is coming up on it's thirtieth birthday, and many
| people might have other things to do with its cash.
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| Such legal changes would also need to address selling the
| company and / or its assets lest someone scheme to get around
| the length of life limit.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I am not so sure - if you owned a million shares of IBM plc
| and suddenly the CEO moved all the assets into JBM plc and
| you owned a million shares of f'all it looks a lot like
| fraud.
|
| If you get handed a million shares of JBM you will want to be
| really sure they are equivalent or it's fraud. Does JBM have
| the same reputation? The same goodwill? Not if IBM is getting
| shutdown ... fraud again I suspect.
|
| I take your point that there are ways around it. But imagine
| a slightly different scenario - every twenty years each
| marriage was dissolved and you had to sign a new contract to
| remain married - else divorce. Most people will just have an
| excuse to throw a party but ...
|
| What do you think will happen to the divorce rate? And will
| those people find better partners afterwards? Will the mean
| happiness increase ?
| samus wrote:
| This is not possible because it goes against the very
| basics of double-entry bookkeeping.
|
| IBM's assets cannot be _moved_. They can only be sold,
| where assets are exchanged for other assets (most often
| cash or equivalents). What you mean is either petty theft
| or embezzlement, which are (white collar) crimes. In the
| event of an obviously and intentionally unfavourable sale,
| the shareholders (a.k.a. owners) can hold the CEO liable
| for damages. If the assets become impossible to recover,
| they are written off, which is a kind of expense in
| bookkeeping term. If this event is not recorded as such,
| there would be other crimes.
|
| Double-entry bookkeeping ensures that assets can only
| appear on JBM's balance sheet if their source is
| documented. In practice, this meanr that they were lawfully
| acquired. Otherwise, the auditor would be on the hook.
|
| Of course, it can always be that illicit activities are
| creatively hidden on the balance sheet and that the auditor
| didn't spot them. In that case, it could indeed be that JBM
| would have to either fix the reported budget or suddenly
| write off the amount that was found they don't really own.
| Things like these are always a risk.
|
| Shares on the stock market are only worth their resale
| value and what dividends they can be expected to yield.
| This is hopefully basic knowledge to anyone who engages in
| stock trading, and it's the reason why public companies are
| tightly regulated and have to regularly undergo audits and
| report to the shareholders. The stock market does the rest.
|
| I'd love to get educated, but I guess most divorces happen
| either within the first five years or after ~twenty years
| when the things that kept a bad marriage together (kids or
| physical appearances) go away. Limiting any marriage to 20
| years would only get rid of the latter. I also guess that a
| lot less people would marry because marriage is a way to
| ensure the economic existence of the party who sacrificed
| their career to take care of children.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Ok, I am probably going to go back on my original idea -
| it's highly likely that regulatory effort into ensuring
| open transparent competition will get better outcomes than
| end of life cut offs.
|
| Always go for the hard work option not the easy to
| administer option
| simonh wrote:
| Why is the concept of juridical personhood, as against natural
| personhood, at odds with infinite duration?
|
| The law doesn't place a mandatory span on the recognition of
| natural personhood anyway. If someone did live forever, there's
| no law or legal obstacle to them doing so and exercising their
| rights in perpetuity.
| hgsgm wrote:
| _Legal person_ means _fictional_ person, as in a synthetic
| object the law applies to. It never meant "the corporation has
| civil rights" independent of its members' rights".
|
| Humans are not _legal persons_ , they are _natural persons_
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| And those people are free to sell their google shares.
| hgsgm wrote:
| Zero investors in a corporation want their money back. The ones
| that did sold their shares. Why make them dissolve and
| reincorporate and disrupt the ongoing business?
| samus wrote:
| There are special legal structures for corporations that
| entitle participants to withdraw their shares. But these are
| obviously not suitable for businesses that cannot tolerate
| this eventuality.
| drdrek wrote:
| Very interesting, thank you :)
| jgeada wrote:
| I find it particularly revealing that in these discussions about
| corporate personhood, the supporters go on and on about the
| rights of corporations but never about the responsibilities of
| corporations, and absolutely never about parity of consequences
| when there is wrongdoing
| deepsquirrelnet wrote:
| Also, I find it interesting that the intersection of populist
| views never seems to create cognitive dissonance, where we have
| given over outsized political influence to entities which can
| have foreign ownership.
| [deleted]
| forevergreenyon wrote:
| > _Whether the corporation should be considered a person_
|
| My opinion is that "of course" they are; but that this also poses
| a challenge to our pre-corporate notion (conceptualization) of
| personhood.
|
| My chosen way to make sense of this is that corporations are a
| person of a type person that exists above the layer (or 'strata')
| in which typical individual humans are persons. I say 'above'
| because human individuals are one of the main 'ingredients' that
| come together to form corporate persons.
|
| the picture is how there are 'personhoods' of (at least) two
| distinct layers or strata: individual and collective persons. So
| the human individuals come together to form corporate
| individuals, a sort of meta-person.
|
| And I mean this very much in the sense of an egregore; the main
| difference being how earlier large bureaucracies would use papers
| and letters and such, but corporate bureaucracies are now fully
| digitized and using computers in networks.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| I'm not sure 'meta-person' makes much sense. 'Meta-data' is
| data about data, but what's a meta-person? A person composed of
| other people? Would such a person-made-of-people have free
| will, or would its actions be constrained by majority
| groupthink outcomes?
|
| In the case of today's corporations, it's just the executive
| board (selected by the shareholders) that makes the decisions,
| with no input from the employees except in places like Germany
| where labor unions often have board seats. Meta-executive,
| perhaps?
|
| Interestingly, if corporations are people, do states in the USA
| with the death penalty have the right to dissolve corporations
| that commit murder? How would a corporation be incarcerated for
| a crime like bank robbery, what would a prison for corporations
| look like?
|
| It's hard to conclude that corporate personhood is just a
| convenient legal fiction whose true intent is to expand the
| liability protection for shareholders and protect internal
| corporate documents from legal discovery and so on.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| What is the use of such a definition that needs to be qualified
| so much?
|
| Its not a philosophical question, you don't need to decide it.
| Its just legal argument people came up with to try and give
| companies broad liberties to make more money. The article
| posted is about people's perceptions, of which it seems you are
| an outlier :).
| [deleted]
| devmor wrote:
| By this logic, any group of people cooperating to do anything
| is also a person. That is utterly nonsensical - what is the
| point of defining a group of people as a person?
| theGnuMe wrote:
| When the are engaged in any activity and need to limit
| liability.
| samus wrote:
| Let's make an example: a group of people want to play
| football and have to rent a field. If they know each other
| very well, they could pool money and entrust one of them to
| rent the field. Activities like this are very common, but
| usually one-off and easily "audited" by the others.
|
| If this activity is on a recurring basis though, or if there
| are new people joining, this way of doing things quickly
| becomes very awkward. What recourse have the group members if
| that person doesn't act on their task, or makes a deal with
| the owner of the field and pockets the difference, or uses
| the cash to bridge over cashflow holes in their personal
| finances? Or if they simply become incommunicado, or even
| die? The problems become even more severe when activities
| like festivals are organized, where the organizer would have
| to assume additional responsibilites. These problems would
| discourage any nontrivial economic activity.
|
| Similar arguments can be made for other economic activities
| where unlimited and exclusive personal responsibility would
| be awkward. It's probably possible to regulate many aspects
| of such activities using contracts. But by doing that,
| something very similar to a corporation would be created. Of
| course, these days nobody does it this way. Most countries
| have very well developed laws that simplify these affairs.
| forevergreenyon wrote:
| yes, I admit that I've been trying to think about social
| interactions through this lens too.
|
| but there's a difference between any random group and a
| corporation. The idea being that writing so many things down,
| and maybe more importantly, putting money into the 'group'
| (and all the associated formalities) makes this transient
| person formed into something more permanent, something that
| can change out the people involved and make the corporation
| outlive its creators (which most corporations do normally).
| mypastself wrote:
| That definition could also apply to nations, religious
| groups, sports teams, and many other types of organization,
| completely redefining the term "person". What would be the
| purpose?
| ModernMech wrote:
| You're staring down a rabbit hole. If want answers to
| some of these questions, enjoy:
|
| http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAcon
| sci...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism
|
| Note: there are no real answers here, of course. I think
| the "purpose" though would be a less myopic view of what
| a person is. Notably, that there's no reason "person" and
| "homo sapien" should be synonymous. Once you admit that,
| then things start to get really fuzzy and we need a
| framework to get back to something that makes sense.
| mypastself wrote:
| Until we gain a proper understanding and definition of
| consciousness, the matter is almost purely linguistic.
| Redefining the term "person" could happen if there's a
| critical mass for it, but I think it's unlikely because
| it would almost certainly serve to confuse, rather than
| inform, at least in everyday communication.
|
| I haven't looked deeply into the linked paper yet
| (although it does look interesting), but I've given the
| philosophical matter some amount of thought before.
|
| I can only be (fairly) certain of the existence of my own
| consciousness. There's no reason to think I'm special in
| regards to other people, so it's safe to assume they have
| it as well. Animals seem to exhibit similar behaviors,
| and since we have a shared evolutionary background, I'd
| include many animal species, too.
|
| Can't say much for anything beyond that, regardless of
| how convincing, say, an AI's words might sound. A
| photorealistic painting might also fool me, but I still
| wouldn't attribute personhood to it afterwards.
|
| The _Star Trek: The Next Generation_ episode "The Measure
| of a Man" did slightly change my mind on this matter,
| though. If we ever construct an artificial intelligence
| sufficiently similar to a human, it might be wise to err
| on the side of caution with respect to ethical treatment.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| A corporation has no responsibility to be morally good and is
| legally protected when being irresponsible. A person on the other
| hand is held to that same responsibility and prosecuted to the
| fullest when not.
|
| This is quite kafkaesque(the castle, the trial, the
| metamorphosis, etc) to build on-top of the paper's title. True
| horror.
| ModernMech wrote:
| I've always maintained that if for-profit corporations are
| people, they are psychopaths. There's no mechanism for empathy in
| corporate structure, and indeed actual psychopaths are
| overrepresented in corporate boardrooms. Combined with the top-
| down nature of a corporation, where rules are made at the top and
| projected down onto employees that must comply or be cast out of
| the corporation, this makes corporations akin to totalitarian
| dictatorships, with the CEO in the role of Dear Leader. Often
| they even expect to be treated explicitly as such.
|
| I much prefer a more democratic system of work. I wouldn't
| tolerate a totalitarian government at the national level, why
| would I willingly subject myself to one at my workplace for 40+
| hours a week? I want a vote on my role, who my boss is, and what
| rules I have to follow. Most importantly, I want the executives'
| votes to count just as much as any employee's, and I want them to
| be bound as well by the rules we all vote on.
|
| Turns out such entities are not as optimized at extracting wealth
| for shareholders, but they still do a decent job, and in my
| experience are far more aligned with community interests. In the
| future, I hope for more democratic corporate structures to become
| more popular, because I think the totalitarian profit-above-all
| model of a corporation has reached its limit.
| parthianshotgun wrote:
| You clearly aren't aware of the rule of acquisition 211:
|
| Employees are the rungs on the ladder of success. Don't
| hesitate to step on them.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| The hum of all drones is larger than the sum of the clones.
|
| Synergistic buzzing, vague wording, public relations and human
| resources,
|
| all good for emptying your purses.
|
| Bzzt! Bzzt!
|
| :->
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Like the bumper sticker/fridge magnet says, I'll believe that
| corporations are people (or insects) when the state of Texas
| executes one.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Right now they are an ant death spiral.
| rhaway84773 wrote:
| Of course corporations shouldn't be considered persons. They're
| corporations.
|
| Now it's possible there's a complete intersection in the legal
| rules which apply to persons and corporations, but that doesn't
| mean they're the same type of entities.
|
| It's useful to remember that corporate personhood is little more
| than a legal shortcut or convenience at best.
| noiv wrote:
| Of course corporations can and should be considered "legal
| persons".
|
| Under the law, corporations possess many of the same rights and
| responsibilities as individuals. They can enter contracts, loan
| and borrow money, sue and be sued, hire employees, own assets,
| and pay taxes.
|
| https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/corporation.asp
| https://news.law.fordham.edu/jcfl/2018/11/18/a-brief-history...
| infogulch wrote:
| Can they be incarcerated for misbehaving? No, the Corp can
| just evaporate and reform under a new name if their assets
| were managed properly. We should have some compensation for
| this.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Until Texas executes a corporation they can't be considered
| people.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| Texas might not have, but didn't the web pki folks
| execute one of their CAs a while back?
| hgsgm wrote:
| Corporate law is that compensation. Originally, corporate
| charters were only granted to organizations that proved
| their worth, and could revoked if they failed to uphold it.
| When a corporation commits a crime, the managers and
| employees are responsible.
|
| Now, does law enforcement enforce the law? No, and there
| the problem.
| simonh wrote:
| Except that it patently does. Often. Corporations are
| fined, barred from various activities, have assets seized
| and members of them get sent to jail for criminal
| activity.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Small correction: typically it is not the _members_ of a
| corporation who serve jail time associated with the
| corporation 's criminal activity, but employees. To the
| extent that these two groups do sometimes overlap due to
| stock-based compensation schemes, your point is true.
| However, the corollary, which is that we generally do
| _NOT_ hold the members of a corporation guilty for the
| acts of a corporation, remains the somewhat more potent
| observation.
| simonh wrote:
| We don't hold them responsible for the actions of the
| corporation. We hold them responsible for their actions.
| For example the VW exec jailed over the diesel emissions
| scandal, and the former CEO has been charged with giving
| false testimony.
| goodluckchuck wrote:
| Can they be incarcerated for misbehaving?
|
| - their members and employee can be incarcerated,
|
| - they can be enjoined / barred from conducting x, y, z
| activities,
|
| - they can be executed / dissolved,
|
| - they are subject to civil asset forfeiture if their
| assets were used in a crime.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Can corporations be owned, or is that tantamount to
| slavery?
| simonh wrote:
| Corporations are not natural persons, so it's not an
| issue.
| ModernMech wrote:
| > their members and employee can be incarcerated,
|
| Next time I commit a crime, I'll see if the prosecutors
| will settle for incarcerating some of my gut fauna.
| akomtu wrote:
| We don't imprison just the robber's hand: it's always the
| entire robber.
|
| Try paying taxes like a corporation would - 20% on
| profits after expenses - and see if the judge buys your
| argument that you're a corporation.
| groestl wrote:
| > corporate personhood is little more than a legal shortcut or
| convenience at best.
|
| Kind of like inheritance vs. composition.
| safety1st wrote:
| Before anyone debates any position relative to the statement
| that "corporations are people," they should read the Wikipedia
| article on legal personhood:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_person
|
| It would immediately improve the quality of any discussion on
| the matter. This is a legal term. In law there are natural
| persons (humans) and juridicial persons (entities which can do
| some of the things which persons do, like own property, but not
| all of them).
|
| So yes. Everyone knows that a corporation is not a natural
| person. No need to point that out. You don't have to pass the
| bar to know it.
|
| There is an interesting discussion to be had for sure about
| what rights we should extend to a juridicial person, and what
| rights we shouldn't. Society wouldn't function if we didn't
| have them at all. But it doesn't follow that they should be as
| similar to a natural person as possible. They are conceived
| basically as a practical shorthand for dealing with a group of
| people who want to jointly own property, conduct business,
| incur debts, and so on. A world without this collaboration
| would end up with... weird ultra-mighty barons doing that and
| personally employing thousands? Who knows.
|
| No one sensible wants to treat them as natural persons.
| Arguments that they should gain rights just because "they're
| people" are specious. I just think the whole discussion is
| elevated if we talk about natural persons vs.
| juridicial/juristic persons.
| samus wrote:
| It's really hard to imagine what a world without corporate
| personhood would look like. Legal structures resembling
| corporate personhood have existed since ancient times. This
| is because corporate personhood is an emergent economic
| phenomenon. It's simply a natural activity for persons to
| pool together their resources and act for a common purpose.
| Legal measures to make forming and operating as a group
| easier and more reliable would invariably end up creating
| something very similar to a corporation.
| analog31 wrote:
| >>>> They are conceived basically as a practical shorthand
| for dealing with a group of people who want to jointly own
| property, conduct business, incur debts, and so on.
|
| In my view, that's called a partnership. The defining
| entitlement for a corporation is limitation of liability for
| shareholders. If you own stock in Chrysler Corporation, and
| they can't pay their debts, their creditors can't come to
| your house and auction off your belongings. It's a transfer
| of risk from investors to creditors. Another way of looking
| at it, is that there's an artificial price floor of zero on a
| share of Chrysler stock.
|
| This is not true for a sole proprietorship or general
| partnership. And natural people have different rules for when
| they can't pay their debts, thanks to bankruptcy law.
|
| Society grants this entitlement because we expect to receive
| a share of the benefits, at the very least in the form of
| higher overall prosperity.
|
| I have a strong hunch that without liability limitation, it
| would not be possible to raise capital for great ventures
| that make things like steel, airplanes, telecommunications,
| or computer chips. The typical "large" business would be
| something like a small factory or retail store.
| elcritch wrote:
| Most European bankruptcy laws still require individuals to
| repay their debts. There's a lot of research indicating
| that this reduces entrepreneurship and economic prosperity.
| That'd agree with your hunch I think.
| analog31 wrote:
| Indeed, this situation could be analogous to the fear of
| medical bankruptcy in the US, which is also said to
| stifle entrepreneurship.
| samus wrote:
| Even the absence of bankruptcy laws wouldn't help to reduce
| the risk of lending to a private person. A private person
| is only of limited economic value and can realistically not
| be expected to ever be able to repay the possibly
| astronomic debts that corporations can accrue.
| hgsgm wrote:
| > Everyone knows that a corporation is not a natural person.
|
| Not everyone knows that is true *legally" The bulk of public
| debate is ignorant wailing motivated by a false belief that
| the law treats corporations as natural persons.
| simonh wrote:
| Indeed that's the message the paper conveys. Most people
| have no real idea how the law works on this, what the
| distinctions are, or why. Reading the comments here, many
| HN commenters seem to have no clue whatsoever what the
| actual legal facts or issues are either. They just have a
| vague impression and form opinions contextually on that
| basis.
|
| However anyone actually deciding these things should doo so
| on the basis of an actual understanding of the real
| position in law and the consequences of changing it.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| If corporations are people - and if a single corporation is an
| 'independent entity separate from indidivuals that constitute it'
| - then there is only one logical classification that makes sense:
| if corporations are people, then they are also slaves.
|
| People after all, have free will - and if they can't choose to
| quit their jobs, terminate their relationships with shareholders,
| executives, employees, etc., then they are in a position of
| slavery or at least, indentured servitude of some sort. If
| corporations are people, they are also owned entities, they can
| be traded and sold like slaves on an auction block in New Orleans
| were 200 years ago. This seems problematic from both legal and
| moral standpoints, doesn't it?
|
| One interesting solution would be to give each corporation its
| own AI mind that could argue for the corporation's interests and
| exercise free will. This would of course be complicated - the
| corporation might independently negotiate contracts with
| shareholders (who supply capital) and employees (who supply
| labor), rather than be entirely beholden to the executive board
| (which, in this scenario, would be reduced to an entirely
| _advisory_ role, if not eliminated entirely).
|
| Another stipulation could be that the corporation, our
| independent intelligent AI entity, would always hold a majority
| ownership in itself, i.e. 51% of shares at least. Of course, this
| would also do away with holding corporations, shell corporations,
| and other forms of hidden ownership.
|
| Well... it's an interesting idea. Of course, the corporation was
| originally set up as a legal entity to shield investors from
| legal liability for their actions, comparable to organized crime
| setups where the Dons reap the majority of the profits but never
| get their hands dirty themselves.
| kerkeslager wrote:
| 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.
| erik_seaberg wrote:
| 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.
| kerkeslager wrote:
| > 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.
| erik_seaberg wrote:
| 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.
| kerkeslager wrote:
| > 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.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| (wiki) "The idiom tongue-in-cheek refers to a humorous or
| sarcastic statement expressed in a serious manner."
| kerkeslager wrote:
| Alright, you got me, but in my defense, this is Hacker
| News. I guarantee that some of your upvotes are people
| unironically agreeing with you.
| samus wrote:
| The AI argument is completely irrelevant. The owners of a
| corporation already delegate decision making to one or more
| _natural_ intelligences, also known as the board. This (hive)
| mind is responsible for acting in the corporation 's interest.
| ModernMech wrote:
| > People after all, have free will - and if they can't choose
| to quit their jobs, terminate their relationships with
| shareholders, executives, employees, etc., then they are in a
| position of slavery or at least, indentured servitude of some
| sort.
|
| That's not quite the way I see it. To me, a corporation is an
| emergent intelligence that results from a system of smaller
| parts interacting with one another. Those parts are in fact
| shareholders, executives, employees, etc. In this sense, saying
| a corporate person is a slave to its employees is like saying
| we biological people are slaves to our cells and organs.
|
| I have no idea if that's true, but I think it's fun to think
| about the implications. It certainly brings into question one
| of the premises of your post; that people have free will.
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| > Whether the corporation should be considered a person is a
| matter of active academic and public debate.
|
| In my experience this is a US phenomenon. I am a lawyer in a
| different common law jurisdiction where corporate personhood is
| pretty much uncontroversial. Everyone knows that companies can
| deal in and own property, can enter into contracts, can sue and
| be sued. There is no real public debate about it. It seems to be
| controversial in the US because of the Citizens United decision.
|
| I have to admit I don't fully understand the significance of the
| Citizens United decision. I get that it was based on the idea
| that corporations have the same rights as people under the
| constitution and that its effect was to increase the influence of
| money in politics. But if Citizens United held that it's illegal
| to restrict corporate spending on politics, presumably it must
| have already been illegal to restrict individuals' spending on
| politics, so presumably wealthy individuals could have spent
| their money on politics anyway (the only difference being that
| it's slightly less convenient when you can't use a corporation)?
|
| If my understanding is wrong I'd be grateful to be educated.
| JackFr wrote:
| I would suggest reading the actual opinion. Supreme Court
| Justices are typically pretty clear and concise writers. It's
| very surprising how approachable the texts are.
|
| There is _some_ value to reading "explainers" who might explain
| some context or history, but less than you might imagine
| because every explainer typically brings a slant or spin of
| their own.
| hliyan wrote:
| While corporate personhood is uncontroversial in the context of
| legal tradition, I've always wondered whether another
| intelligent species with a psychology similar to ours (or even
| humanity, had our cultural development taken a different path),
| would consider it a fundamental legal concept. If a natural
| person were to be incentivised as a corporation is (i.e.
| complete self interest, only held back by the law, and even
| then, only if the penalty is higher than the profit from the
| action that led to it), we would generally describe them as a
| "sociopath".
| none_to_remain wrote:
| I don't think there is any serious controversy about corporate
| personhood in the US.
|
| Plenty of unserious, ignorant shouting, though
| ghaff wrote:
| There are reasonable criticisms of Citizens United around
| limiting spending of corporate money directly related to
| politics. However, the lazy "corporate personhood" putdown is
| mostly silly. Obviously there are and have long been _many_
| ways in which corporations, trade associations, LLPs, etc.
| effectively act as a person for mostly good reasons. Barring
| criminal acts, you really don 't want people suing a company
| for some action to instead identify all the individuals who
| were involved in some decision and go after them personally.
| saghm wrote:
| > Barring criminal acts, you really don't want people suing
| a company for some action to instead identify all the
| individuals who were involved in some decision and go after
| them personally.
|
| You've inadvertently touched upon the thing I find most
| confusing about the concept of "corporate personhood",
| which is that they aren't treated anything like people when
| it comes to crimes. You might argue this makes sense, since
| they can't become citizens or vote either, but at that
| point I have to wonder why "corporations are people" is a
| more reasonable way to define things than just saying that
| some (but not all) things people do can also be done by
| corporations (like owning property, etc.). It makes as much
| sense to me as arguing that we should just define bats as
| birds because most animals that fly are birds, and it would
| be easier to just make "flying" only apply to birds instead
| of just saying it's a thing that non-birds can do as well.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| There is plenty of serious controversy about it.
|
| Should corporations be capable of holding religious
| conviction? Various evangelical Christian business owners and
| a number of conservative judges say "of course". Plenty of
| other serious, well-informed people say, in relatively quite
| voices, "absolutely not".
|
| Should a corporation organized for the purpose of making a
| profit be permitted to freely spend on political campaigns?
| SCOTUS thought yes, plenty of other people think not (even if
| they would allow non-profit corporations to do so).
|
| Plenty more like that.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| > In my experience this is a US phenomenon.
|
| Yeah I think so to. Regarding "public debate", no lay person
| would really have an intuition for a corporation being a
| person. It't not considered one.
|
| > I am a lawyer in a different common law jurisdiction where
| corporate personhood is pretty much uncontroversial.
|
| Oh ok...
| [deleted]
| cowmoo728 wrote:
| The primary issue, as I understand it, is front groups. Like
| some big industry will put up a 501c4 front group called
| something generic like "Cool People of America" and spend $1B
| of secret money to accuse their opponent of eating babies. No
| one can know where the money came from or really anything about
| the group, but they still have a legal right to spend unlimited
| amounts of money. It's easier for the public to understand if
| the money is attributable to company X or person Z.
| silvestrov wrote:
| Interesting. In EU there is a big push for documenting the
| real ownership of companies. So you can't hide behind shell
| companies. I.e. a difference between "legal owner" and "real
| owner".
|
| E.g. a comapny like "nemlig.com Inc" is owned by "INTERVARE
| Inc" which is owned by 2 persons. But you still have to
| document those 2 persons for nemlig.com
|
| See "Ejerforhold/Ownership" on
| https://datacvr.virk.dk/enhed/virksomhed/33070861
| tbrownaw wrote:
| A fair few people _really_ don 't like how robust our free
| speech protections are. _Citizens United_ upheld those
| protections against yet another attempted "workaround".
| hgsgm wrote:
| You mean free _spending_ , because US government decided that
| spending money is speech or press.
| SQueeeeeL wrote:
| Yeah, money is speech in the US. I kinda hate when people
| think poor people have as much of a voice as rich people lol,
| like, maybe when you stop working at McDonald's politicians
| will listen to you. Liberals really have no idea how the
| world works, I swear
| branko_d wrote:
| Whatever the theoretical justification for Citizens United
| might have been, the practical effect is that it _weakens_
| the free speech.
| Isamu wrote:
| Corporations were developed as a legal entity to take on
| responsibility and rights on behalf of a group that previously
| were only associated with a person.
|
| But it is more of an analogy, and like all analogies it falls
| apart at some point. It doesn't quite make sense to permit a
| corporation to be President, you would have to interpret the
| law in creative ways that likely would not prevail in court.
| hikawaii wrote:
| The big issue here was with financing political spend as a
| corporation, and the finding was that there is no law today
| that stops corporate political spend.
|
| The reasoning was along the lines that because corporations are
| people, and most organizations in the US are technically
| corporations (yes, even nonprofits, ngos, unions, clubs, etc)
| there's not really a way to subset out "large publicly held
| international conglomerates" or "businesses in industries that
| are mostly supplying the government" from "all social,
| business, and political organizations"
| greenpresident wrote:
| This debate is internationally relevant when it comes to moral
| agency of corporations. The question is whether corporations
| have first-order moral responsibilities or whether all the
| responsibilities fall onto the shareholders. It is separate
| from the question of legal personhood which I agree is not
| controversial in most discourses.
| [deleted]
| amelius wrote:
| > Whether the corporation should be considered a person is a
| matter of active academic and public debate.
|
| If a corporation is considered a person, then it's the biggest
| asshole I know.
| bumby wrote:
| Maybe it's just a useful abstraction that allows
| shareholders/executives to act like assholes with some moral
| veil. At the end of the day, it's still natural persons making
| decisions.
| otikik wrote:
| The whole "corporations are people" nonsense has to stop.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-02-12 23:01 UTC)