>From: James Wetterau <jwjr@panix.com>
>Subject: Re: Bugs in free markets.
>Date: Sun, 3 Sep 2000 17:27:09 -0400 (EDT)
>
>Hal wrote:
>...
> > Corporations are a matter of people getting together cooperatively to
> > organize their efforts. How can it be evil for a group of people to
> > voluntarily organize, and to offer jobs to others? Every aspect of
> > the process, from the formation of the corporation, to the job offer,
> > to the acceptance, is voluntary and agreed to by all concerned.
>...
>
>Actually, corporations receive limitations on their liability. So if,
>for example, a simple business partnership up the block from me
>accidentally causes my house to be blown up, I might be able to
>successfully sue the business owners to recover damages. But if the
>very same people have organized the otherwise identical business as a
>corporation and do the very same thing, due to their magical limited
>liability, the corporation must pay but the stockholders do not, since
>their liability is limited. Now, perhaps the corporation does not
>possess the resources to pay, but the stockholders do. In that case I
>believe I would be out of luck. Of course there are sometimes ways to
>"pierce the corporate veil" (sounds exciting doesn't it?). And
>different standards of liability apply in different cases. IANAL.
>But still, people incorporate for the liability limitations.
>
>The only difference in the two instances could be that in the first
>case the business might be a simple partnership, and in the second
>case it was a corporation, having duly filed "articles of
>incorporation" with the secretary of state of the state of
>Massachusetts. And therefore in one case I can recover damages from
>the business owners and in the other case I might not. This strikes
>me as something which materially affects me to which I never agreed.
>
>Regards,
>James Wetterau
In fact, the push by the "progressives" of the latter 19th century -
trust-busting, regulatory boards, etc., was actually a Satanic Pact, if ever
there was one. In exchange for accepting state control of one's business -
which is what one does when one incorporates (think of all the business
regulations, and all the bureacrats who feed off them) - one gets the .ltd
stamp, and if you make a risky bet on your chemical plant (or nuclear
processing facility) then you lose the company, but you personally walk
scott free.
Talk about socially irresponsible policy. The leftist "progressives"
(Lovely term, like "Pro-Life, you know) undercut every common law avenue of
recourse. You could no longer make a common law suit against a corporation
- not if it was already covered in regulatory statute, with
slap-on-the-wrist fines and ten inspectors (nine of whom somehow owned
second homes in Burmuda) to cover an entire state.
How many disasters are lurking out there as a consequence is anybody's
guess. Somewhere outside of Athens, GA, for example, there is an old
nuclear waste disposal site, right next to a sizeable steam. The records
for it have long disappeared. It was already abandoned in the late '60's,
when I stumbled accross it. The private group that has been trying to
locate all such sites for twenty years has also heard about it, but they
haven't had the manpower or money to do the kind of investigations needed.
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