7 ms·

This. The entire point of corporations is to shield individuals from penalties, but they don’t work. Business failure in good faith, where the shielding makes s

by maiar 2y ago

This. The entire point of corporations is to shield individuals from penalties, but they don’t work. Business failure in good faith, where the shielding makes sense, is not really protected because bank loans require personal liability and because it’s impossible these days to recover from a damaged reputation unless you come from a family rich enough to hire its own PR firm. On the other hand, when it comes to letting rich people get away with absolutely unambiguous criminality, corporations work very well.

alt227 2y ago
I get the feeling this was the plan from begining.
- lesuorac 2y ago
  Sure, the plan (of LLCs) was always to limit liability but initially _who_ could incorporate wasn't literally everybody. Like the founding fathers ran their business as themselves. There isn't some Monticello LLC that Thomas Jefferson was CEO of so if TJ did something bad then he's personally liable for it. This is what's changed and is the problem, people get LLCs in situations they really don't deserve them in.
  - datavirtue 2y ago
    What are you talking about?
- brookst 2y ago
  While the lack of accountability for corporations is crazy, I’m a firm believer in the Cube observation: there is no master plan.
  - namaria 2y ago
    There is one master plan tho: might is right. It gets pushed back, but it seeps through every contention wall we have put up so far.
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      Countries with might is right systems don't have corporate ownership, they have personal fiefdoms.
    - brookst 2y ago
      A flaw in human nature, but not a plan. There was no board meeting where people came up with it and set out a roadmap and had milestones and KPIs. It’s an emergent property and it sucks, but there’s no conspiracy.
      - wahnfrieden 2y ago
        Then what is coordinated lobbying
      - namaria 2y ago
        The owning class everywhere has always gotten together trying to figure out how to keep things the way they are.
- contingencies 2y ago
  IIRC the modern corporation as a legal entity was created in response to the high capital and high risk requirements embodied in early western shipping ventures. The first stock exchange ("bourse") for this was actually French(?) (hazy here, possibly Belgian or Dutch, and probably roots in Hanseatic League financing if not beyond). FWIW there's a whole subset of the antiques world which deals in share notes - promissory notes issued to people funding capital intensive ventures like new railway lines, often beautifully decorated and serial numbered for nominal security against forgery. AFAIK the follow-on concern of manipulation of the modern legal environment as a tool for unencumbered multinational greed really began with entities like the East India Company being empowered by pontificating rulers back home granting because-I-said-so immunity for arbitrary actions outside their borders, thus establishing the ground work for industrial scale opium trading, piracy, slavery, and banana republics. We're in a period of relative reckoning now where the cash-piles thus accrued are facing some popular scrutiny, but there'll never be recompense. As we've reached the ends of the earth and new wealth to seize has become scarce, we've turned to speculation and beyond earth to mars, the metaverse, and media in general. Stock markets are largely society's greed temples and in some cases designed for money laundering (eg. Singapore stock market for the Burmese junta). Even small companies on the public markets are worth orders of magnitude more than you can earn in a lifetime, leading to an intellectual drain toward speculative systemic value extraction instead of productive ventures. IMHO a naive hope of crypto was a reckoning, instead we received the opposite: increased speculation, libertarian multinational economics and now abject political profiteering. No action on critical issues like climate. Less international trust and diplomatic potential than we've had since WWII - truly, we are lost. But it's less a conspiracy than a back-scratching piggy trough of reverent greed-inertia, in which all pigs are created equal but a cabal of investment bankers are more equal than others. Meanwhile everyone else slave for their locally dangled currency carrot, backed primarily by golden handcuffs of mortgages, an inertia of ignorance, a charade of democratic process, increasing global population dependence on multinational trade to meet quality of life expectations, and conveniently captured choke points like identity (The End of the Nation State: The Rise of Regional Economies), food (Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System), regulation (Preventing Regulatory Capture: Special Interest Influence and How to Limit It), international logistics (The Outlaw Ocean, International Shipping Cartels), energy (Energy Revolutions: Profiteering versus Democracy), education (Privatizing the Public University), media (Selective Control: The Political Economy of Censorship) and weaponized finance (Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, Mortgaged Democracy). It is perhaps not overly hyperbolic to state that the challenge of our era is to determine a mode of capturing the power of emergent technology to undo this situation, and nothing less than the fate of the planet rests on doing so.
miohtama 2y ago
Corporations are owned by people. Profit is distributed back to the society thru dividends. The largest shareholder category is pension funds, not billionaires. So effectively boomers are robbing younger generations.
- eesmith 2y ago
  I hate that ever since I was a teen in the 80's I've been encouraged by government policy to put my retirement into pension funds which invest in the stock market, thus justifying all manner of immoral and unethical business practices in the name of protecting pensioner savings. I am complicit in a rigged system with no escape.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - miohtama 2y ago
    It's possible to save pension by investing without pension funds. However the trick is that most pension funds are underfunded and run like a Ponzi, thus constantly need larger and larger group of young people to fund them. If and when this system collapses is going to hurt the government and that's why the encounrage to keep the Ponzi going.
    - klipt 2y ago
      The whole concept of "retirement" where old people are allowed to relax and be supported by young people, compared to the old days when people just worked until they died, requires enough surplus productivity from young people to look after old people as well as themselves. If the population pyramid inverts and there are too few young people, the whole concept of "retirement" becomes unsustainable, unless AI advances enough to make up the lost productivity. Pensions are just a way of formalizing the obligation to old people, but they are not themselves the root source of the problem.
      - eesmith 2y ago
ryandrake 2y ago
The corporate veil should provide enough protection from random and unforeseeable failures to encourage entrepreneurship, but not enough that it shields wrongdoers from consequences. Currently it shields nearly everyone from everything in nearly all cases from run-of-the-mill business failure all the way up to straight-up fraud.
- gruez 2y ago
  >Currently it shields nearly everyone from everything in nearly all cases from run-of-the-mill business failure all the way up to straight-up fraud. Tell that to Bill Hwang or Sam Bankman-Fried.
  - maiar 2y ago
    The problem is that only 0.01% of the people who need to be held accountable are. The number isn’t zero, clearly, but how many of the people who caused the 2008 disaster ended up in prison? My point exactly. I also think it’s clear that SBF was jailed for his effects on the rich rather than on average people. Worse than fleecing billionaires, he made them look bad. Clearly he’s a scumbag who deserves prison time, but people worse than him are free.
    - gruez 2y ago
      >but how many of the people who caused the 2008 disaster ended up in prison? My point exactly. >I also think it’s clear that SBF was jailed for his effects on the rich rather than on average people. Worse than fleecing billionaires, he made them look bad. "The rich" was upset enough at SBF losing $32 billion to throw the book at him, but are totally fine with the GFC causing $2 trillion in damage to the global economy?
  - pclmulqdq 2y ago
    Bill Hwang and SBF committed the cardinal sin of business: losing other rich people's money. They both ran out of friends very quickly. Elizabeth Holmes was the same.

by maiar 2y ago

alt227 2y ago

I get the feeling this was the plan from begining.

lesuorac 2y ago
Sure, the plan (of LLCs) was always to limit liability but initially _who_ could incorporate wasn't literally everybody. Like the founding fathers ran their business as themselves. There isn't some Monticello LLC that Thomas Jefferson was CEO of so if TJ did something bad then he's personally liable for it. This is what's changed and is the problem, people get LLCs in situations they really don't deserve them in.
- datavirtue 2y ago
  What are you talking about?
brookst 2y ago
While the lack of accountability for corporations is crazy, I’m a firm believer in the Cube observation: there is no master plan.
- namaria 2y ago
  There is one master plan tho: might is right. It gets pushed back, but it seeps through every contention wall we have put up so far.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    Countries with might is right systems don't have corporate ownership, they have personal fiefdoms.
  - brookst 2y ago
    A flaw in human nature, but not a plan. There was no board meeting where people came up with it and set out a roadmap and had milestones and KPIs. It’s an emergent property and it sucks, but there’s no conspiracy.
    - wahnfrieden 2y ago
      Then what is coordinated lobbying
    - namaria 2y ago
      The owning class everywhere has always gotten together trying to figure out how to keep things the way they are.
contingencies 2y ago
IIRC the modern corporation as a legal entity was created in response to the high capital and high risk requirements embodied in early western shipping ventures. The first stock exchange ("bourse") for this was actually French(?) (hazy here, possibly Belgian or Dutch, and probably roots in Hanseatic League financing if not beyond). FWIW there's a whole subset of the antiques world which deals in share notes - promissory notes issued to people funding capital intensive ventures like new railway lines, often beautifully decorated and serial numbered for nominal security against forgery. AFAIK the follow-on concern of manipulation of the modern legal environment as a tool for unencumbered multinational greed really began with entities like the East India Company being empowered by pontificating rulers back home granting because-I-said-so immunity for arbitrary actions outside their borders, thus establishing the ground work for industrial scale opium trading, piracy, slavery, and banana republics. We're in a period of relative reckoning now where the cash-piles thus accrued are facing some popular scrutiny, but there'll never be recompense. As we've reached the ends of the earth and new wealth to seize has become scarce, we've turned to speculation and beyond earth to mars, the metaverse, and media in general. Stock markets are largely society's greed temples and in some cases designed for money laundering (eg. Singapore stock market for the Burmese junta). Even small companies on the public markets are worth orders of magnitude more than you can earn in a lifetime, leading to an intellectual drain toward speculative systemic value extraction instead of productive ventures. IMHO a naive hope of crypto was a reckoning, instead we received the opposite: increased speculation, libertarian multinational economics and now abject political profiteering. No action on critical issues like climate. Less international trust and diplomatic potential than we've had since WWII - truly, we are lost. But it's less a conspiracy than a back-scratching piggy trough of reverent greed-inertia, in which all pigs are created equal but a cabal of investment bankers are more equal than others. Meanwhile everyone else slave for their locally dangled currency carrot, backed primarily by golden handcuffs of mortgages, an inertia of ignorance, a charade of democratic process, increasing global population dependence on multinational trade to meet quality of life expectations, and conveniently captured choke points like identity (The End of the Nation State: The Rise of Regional Economies), food (Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System), regulation (Preventing Regulatory Capture: Special Interest Influence and How to Limit It), international logistics (The Outlaw Ocean, International Shipping Cartels), energy (Energy Revolutions: Profiteering versus Democracy), education (Privatizing the Public University), media (Selective Control: The Political Economy of Censorship) and weaponized finance (Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, Mortgaged Democracy). It is perhaps not overly hyperbolic to state that the challenge of our era is to determine a mode of capturing the power of emergent technology to undo this situation, and nothing less than the fate of the planet rests on doing so.

miohtama 2y ago

Corporations are owned by people. Profit is distributed back to the society thru dividends. The largest shareholder category is pension funds, not billionaires. So effectively boomers are robbing younger generations.

eesmith 2y ago
I hate that ever since I was a teen in the 80's I've been encouraged by government policy to put my retirement into pension funds which invest in the stock market, thus justifying all manner of immoral and unethical business practices in the name of protecting pensioner savings. I am complicit in a rigged system with no escape.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- miohtama 2y ago
  It's possible to save pension by investing without pension funds. However the trick is that most pension funds are underfunded and run like a Ponzi, thus constantly need larger and larger group of young people to fund them. If and when this system collapses is going to hurt the government and that's why the encounrage to keep the Ponzi going.
  - klipt 2y ago
    The whole concept of "retirement" where old people are allowed to relax and be supported by young people, compared to the old days when people just worked until they died, requires enough surplus productivity from young people to look after old people as well as themselves. If the population pyramid inverts and there are too few young people, the whole concept of "retirement" becomes unsustainable, unless AI advances enough to make up the lost productivity. Pensions are just a way of formalizing the obligation to old people, but they are not themselves the root source of the problem.
    - eesmith 2y ago

ryandrake 2y ago

The corporate veil should provide enough protection from random and unforeseeable failures to encourage entrepreneurship, but not enough that it shields wrongdoers from consequences. Currently it shields nearly everyone from everything in nearly all cases from run-of-the-mill business failure all the way up to straight-up fraud.

gruez 2y ago
>Currently it shields nearly everyone from everything in nearly all cases from run-of-the-mill business failure all the way up to straight-up fraud. Tell that to Bill Hwang or Sam Bankman-Fried.
- maiar 2y ago
  The problem is that only 0.01% of the people who need to be held accountable are. The number isn’t zero, clearly, but how many of the people who caused the 2008 disaster ended up in prison? My point exactly. I also think it’s clear that SBF was jailed for his effects on the rich rather than on average people. Worse than fleecing billionaires, he made them look bad. Clearly he’s a scumbag who deserves prison time, but people worse than him are free.
  - gruez 2y ago
    >but how many of the people who caused the 2008 disaster ended up in prison? My point exactly. >I also think it’s clear that SBF was jailed for his effects on the rich rather than on average people. Worse than fleecing billionaires, he made them look bad. "The rich" was upset enough at SBF losing $32 billion to throw the book at him, but are totally fine with the GFC causing $2 trillion in damage to the global economy?
- pclmulqdq 2y ago
  Bill Hwang and SBF committed the cardinal sin of business: losing other rich people's money. They both ran out of friends very quickly. Elizabeth Holmes was the same.