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  • Posted by $ MikeMarotta 9 years, 5 months ago
    It would be easy enough to give this the first Thumbs Down on the way to a negative million. However, many libertarians (but not Objectivists) are opposed to corporations, either partially, as in this piece, or wholly, as I read the ultimate intent here. Adam Smith was not alone in distrusting joint-stock companies. Even the Austrian economists insist that investment must come from savings, not credit. A common stock capitalization is a massive extension of credit, a bubble no more substantial than fiat currency or the Tulip Craze. But I disagree with von Mises, Adam Smith, and the article linked in the topic here.

    Historically, business partnerships were limited in their scope because no one can speak for the dead. If a partner dies, the enterprise must be dissolved. Practically, the business people of the past just worked around that problem, but it remained a problem until the invention of corporations - a body that exists independent of its members.

    Such corporations go back to Rome c. 100 CE when local fire brigades and funeral trusts were granted special recognition, typically from the "caesar" not from the Senate. The Romans were all about law. Such bodies were analogies from flocks of sheep - buy or sell the flock regardless of its members - and cities: cities were taxed as entities independent of their members.

    The oldest continuing corporation seems to be the Benedictine order, dating, I think to 500 CE.

    We call certain schools "universities" not because they taught everything in the universe, but because they were chartered as law-makers unto themselves for their own members. That goes back to the Middle Ages, of course. Sir Isaac Newton served as Cambridge's delegate to the House of Commons: a corporation had its own representative in the legislature.

    So, this thing with corporations is older than the American industrial era and had complex legal ramifications long before our time.

    Beyond our time, I see us on an event horizon in which corporations can gain true personhood. The science fiction story VALENTINA; SOUL IN SAPPHIRE was published in 1984 just before electronic filing, which we take as common today. In that story, an intelligent program files her own corporation papers and then sues for personhood. Argue it any way you want.
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