This Needs Fixin'

I’m going to step away from writing about the coup today, and talk about a better way to organize corporations.

Because I wanna, that’s why.

And because, when … this … is all dealt with, and we’re deciding how the world that comes after will work, we should try to do better than we have in the past.

So let’s re-imagine the corporation.

First, corporations are not people.

We can have more categories than just “people”, “groups of people” and “nothing”.

So to start with, whatever our new State is it should be forbidden from creating virtual “people” as legal fictions.

People and their rights are independent of and precede the State; corporations and other fictitious entities are created by and secondary to the State.

Second, only real people should be able to hold ownership in corporations.

Corporations owning other corporations is only useful for hiding responsibility for a corporation’s actions and for hiding wealth and obscuring the sort of tricks it gets up to.

It doesn’t benefit society at all.

So ban it.

Third, the only way to acquire ownership should be through labor.

People should have a stake in the organizations that consume their lives, in their corporations as workers just as they should in their State as citizens.

Work for a company, get shares; the longer you work, the more shares you have. When you quit, retire or die the corporation buys out your shares.

We can keep investment around, but as loans and corporate debt rather than as ownership. The wealthy can still use their money to get more, they just wouldn’t get ownership of everything as well.

Fourth, corporations should be forbidden from engaging with politics.

In any way, from attempting to influence voters with advertising to attempting to influence the State by lobbying.

Politics as a realm should be reserved for actual people.

Lastly, corporations should have to treat everyone equally.

A sole-proprietorship or partnership is a person or group of people; a corporation is a creation of the State.

So free-association requires that people, sole-proprietorships and partnerships have the right to associate with whomever they choose. (Though requiring them to publish in public and in advance any limits they’re going to place on association seems like a good idea.)

But corporations are created by the State, so they should be bound by the restriction that the State must treat all the people under its jurisdiction individually and equally.

Corporations, as they are now, are fundamentally incompatible with a free and equal society.

These five changes wouldn’t fix things all by themselves, but they would go a long way and make our society a more fair and equal place to live.

And since we seem to be in a time of changes, let’s make our changes be for the better.

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