bigmacbear (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bigmacbear) wrote2006-03-31 08:01 am
bigmacbear) wrote2006-03-31 08:01 am
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Where the analogy of corporate personhood breaks down.
I've often thought about why corporations tend to do things that if a real person did them would be considered at best unpatriotic and at worst purely evil. Then it occurred to me: while the legal fiction that a corporation is equivalent to a person has its uses, the analogy breaks down when it comes to such qualities as moral intention/motivation, citizenship/nationality, and so on.
Corporations aren't really people after all. They are neither moral nor immoral; they are strictly motivated by what will give them the biggest bang for the buck, for such is their legal responsibility to their shareholders and the entire reason for their existence. They owe allegiance to their country of origin only to the extent the laws regulating their business require them to, and no more. The idea of "good corporate citizenship" went out the window years ago.
This leads to distortions in the economy of labor in particular. When the vast majority of jobs are controlled by entities who have no vested interest in keeping work local, local jobs will dry up. Today as never before, labor has become fungible, even intellectual labor, thanks in large part to improvements in telecommunications and shipping. Small businesses (sole proprietorships and partnerships) were a useful check on the tendencies of large corporations to suck communities dry, but vast numbers of these businesses have succumbed to the endless pressure of the mighty corporation.
And yet the amorality of the corporation itself is often used to excuse the outright immorality of the actual flesh-and-blood people who operate the corporation -- for their own ends rather than those for which it was founded. There, I think, lies the best hope for reform, but it will not fix the problems caused by too much reliance on the analogy of corporate personhood.
How, then, do people empower themselves in the face of corporations? I'd be interested to know.
Corporations aren't really people after all. They are neither moral nor immoral; they are strictly motivated by what will give them the biggest bang for the buck, for such is their legal responsibility to their shareholders and the entire reason for their existence. They owe allegiance to their country of origin only to the extent the laws regulating their business require them to, and no more. The idea of "good corporate citizenship" went out the window years ago.
This leads to distortions in the economy of labor in particular. When the vast majority of jobs are controlled by entities who have no vested interest in keeping work local, local jobs will dry up. Today as never before, labor has become fungible, even intellectual labor, thanks in large part to improvements in telecommunications and shipping. Small businesses (sole proprietorships and partnerships) were a useful check on the tendencies of large corporations to suck communities dry, but vast numbers of these businesses have succumbed to the endless pressure of the mighty corporation.
And yet the amorality of the corporation itself is often used to excuse the outright immorality of the actual flesh-and-blood people who operate the corporation -- for their own ends rather than those for which it was founded. There, I think, lies the best hope for reform, but it will not fix the problems caused by too much reliance on the analogy of corporate personhood.
How, then, do people empower themselves in the face of corporations? I'd be interested to know.