I disagree that corporations should have the "good for humanity" that they do as an influence on their actions. Penalise them for direct harm done to humanity (e.g. contaminating property owned by other people) by all means, but don't argue that its ok to poison 10 people because you employ 35 workers, or something like that.

My view is that the property right (which I define as including ownership of my body, as I say. If my body isn't my property, what exactly is it to me and other people?) is the only right, and avoiding infringement of that right is the only responsibility.

The only way to make sure corparations do not dominate the worls in their own sick way is through regulation. The best form of regulation is a straight tax.

worls = world

"The only way to make sure corparations do not dominate the worls in their own sick way is through regulation. The best form of regulation is a straight tax."

Any justification for the claims that:
1. Corporations want to dominate the world in a sick way
2. They would be able to without regulation
3. A tax would stop them from doing so
per chance?

Corporations are creations of the state. It is the state which charters corporations, pretends that they are persons, and relieves the decision-makers of individual liability. With the actual persons involved believing that their responsibility is to the corporation, and with the corporation not really being a person, it is no surprise that corporations do not act with human empathy but rather like sociopaths.

Consider: As human beings, engaging in business, we have the freedom to choose our priorities. If we consider that some action would be harmful to others, even if it is legal, we can choose to do things differently, even if that means less money. But a for-profit corporation has the legal responsibility to maximise profits, within its charter (which includes the requirement to follow regulatations); an unsrupulous or ignorant shareholder can sue a corporation for acting as any reasonable human being would. This is why only regulations can tame a corporation; whenever it is legal and profitable to ignore the concerns of others, a for-profit corporation usually will. Like a state, a corporation is a hierarchical collective, run by leaders who are managing other people's money, that will naturally try to grow at the expense even of the people who make it up. It is amazing how well the libertarian right recognises these dangers in big government but refuses to apply the same principles to big business; they should read Adam Smith.

But regulation is not a solution! It is amazing how some on the left will say, almost in the same breath, that the government is under the thumb of large corporations and that the government should issue regulations for all corporations. When corporate leaders go up before the legislature and testify that even they favour some regulation for the good of humanity, then watch out! It means that they think that they're prepared to follow the regulation but that their smaller competitors will find it too expensive, allowing them to drive out their competitors and increase their market share. Individual regulations may be good or bad, but the regulatory régime will fall under corporate influence as much as the rest of the government.

I believe that the market should be free, along with everything else. And it cannot be free when it is dominated by these state-chartered monstrosities, the corporations. The whole concept should be done away with.

Corparations do not want anything. They do not think, per say. Corparations, however, tend to purse their intrests. If those interests clash with public health, no matter. May I remind you, by the way, that the most powerful corparations where the east and west india companies. Even then there was regulation. And I don't say tax the corparation because it is one, but tax (heavily) any use of toxic chemicals, CO2 production, etc.

Toby, could you be clearer when you say that an action is harmful to others in the second paragraph, in what way do you claim it as harmful, in a positively harmful sense, that it actively harms them or their property, or in a negative sense, it puts the business they work for out of business, or charges them higher prices because they are free to do so?

JECE, I don't have a problem with hazards at work or hazards from owning a product of a corporation, so long as the existence of those hazards is made perfectly clear. Direct harm done by, say toxic chemicals is, in my view, best dealt with by having a strong judiciary which will impose very heavy charges when harm results from the actions of a corporation, rather than taxation on using a toxic chemical, penalties for having accidents with them. Then, in regard to pollution such as CO2, which has an effective but doesn't provide a clear link between a single polluter and a victim, I would use cap & trade as a way of limiting the amount of pollution that can be produced.

>Toby, could you be clearer when you say that an action is harmful to others in the second paragraph, in what way do you claim it as harmful

I intentionally leave this vague; I could explain what *I* think is harmful, but that's not what I'm getting at. When actual people in human society (that is, individual human beings) make decisions, they have their ideas about what is helpful or harmful to others, and they make decisions based in part on that. Their decisions are usually selfish to some extent, and this varies with the person, but most people will at least listen to you if you say ‘But this harms my property’ or ‘This will drive me out of business’ or whatever argument you want to make, even if in the end it's up to them whether to take it into account.

With a corporate structure (and this applies also to non-profit organisations, governments, etc), the decisions are ultimately still made by individual human beings. But now there is a new factor (especially pronounced in for-profite corporations): the fiduciary duty to maximise profits, within the accepted rules. So people no longer feel free to take anything into account; they are hired on the understanding that they will only take certain things into account, especially the bottom line. That is why large organisations seem like faceless behemoths; even though there are real people inside them, the people are acting on behalf of a soulless monster.

Real freedom is not based on writing down the rules of acceptable behaviour (whether these are a few rules about property rights, or a vast system of law and regulation), and then accepting anything within those rules. It's based on individuals choosing their own values and making decisions based on those values; it is only for dealing with conflicts between individuals that we need previously agreed rules. This works when decisions are made by people about matters that they are close to and understand; conflict can often be avoided because people, even from very different cultures, usually share many basic values and can empathise with each other. But when decisions are made by bureaucrats about distant matters according to their instructions, then this breaks down. This is one reason why I distrust large organisations, including the state and the corporations that it creates.

@Toby

I view complaints such as ‘But this harms my property’ and ‘This will drive me out of business’ as very different. If an iron foundry was set up in town, and drove me, running an old foundry out of business, I would have no grounds for complaint, all that has happened is that somebody is doing better than me. If the iron foundry was built right next to my home, and was damaging my home by the heat it created, then I would have just grounds for complaint. I have a right to my property, but I don't have a right to my business' success.

Why, and how can you assume that profit is necessarily a bad thing? Why do you describe the corporation as a soulless monster because it exists to make a profit? I just don't see why that value is to be written down as amoral or immoral, but others to be praised.

Look at the way in which we do almost everything in our lives: I eat food that could provide greater advantage to a homeless man, choosing food not on the basis of the environmental impact but on whether or not I like it. Is this immoral? No. I go to school, when, all things considered, there are people in greater need of schooling than me. My parents are sufficiently well educated to give me an acceptable level of education, and those without such fortune could go to actual schools. Should I be expected not to go to school? No. I work on good quality paper, of greater density than average, if we were more frugal about our use of it, supply could be increased by 50% and so someone unable to afford paper could get some. Am I wrong to choose good paper? What of my pen, which cost approximately ten times as much as the cheapest Parker fountain pen, fifty times as much as a run-of-the-mill pen crudely made by some nondescript company? Should I be expected to sacrifice that? How about my family's income. My father's pension alone is easily enough to support him and would, at a squeeze, support the whole family. Is it wrong that we seek to spend the money we have on ourselves?

You see, all of these things are types of profit, be it a nicer meal, an education, writing equipment or money for our leisure. Profit is not some abstract concept that is meaningless except as a number put on a line in a company's books. It is the enjoyment, the investment and the happiness that can result from it. Even before the goods are bought, when it is money it still means this. We all seek profit; working for a charity, seeing the benefit done for other people is profit; going out with friends is profit; posting this message is, in the broadest sense, profit. Profit is gain in anything; money is its measure, not its source or destination.

Look again at the corporation. Why does everyone working for it work? Profit. Why do its customers buy the products? Profit. Why does anyone work with it? Profit. Whatever values you think you have, your value is profit, its value is profit and the only difference is scale and co-operation. When you cook a mean, you produce CO2, when the company makes a product, so does it. The difference is that the company involves more people, more profit and more CO2. It is just a matter of scale. If you and a friend agree to cook each other's dinners, one week on, one week off, you begin to co-operate, you become more efficient in costs, be they CO2 emissions, work or actually paying for the food, so you profit more. There is no empathy in this arrangement, no consideration of the needs of the other person, just one motive: profit. But shouldn't we still view it as a virtue?

Corporations aren't faceless, they are a collection of more faces than you could ever know; they shouldn't blow in the wind, the executives within them should guide them forward, onward. They should neither be expected to consider anything other than their own profit, nor claim to do so, and nor should you.

TheGhostmaker: Then you are for regulation, right? As for taxes vs. fines, those two concepts are similar. Nevertheless, I suppose fines might work better than taxes in some instances. As for 'cap and trade', I am strongly against this system. The corporations prefer this scheme because it allows them undue freedom. If a relatively small tax was introduced and slowly raised over time, the effect would be clear. Corporations would be forced to find alternative energy sources.

With cap and trade, you set an absolute limit on the emissions. Surely that is the objective?

I am for regulating on pollution and damage to things not owned by anyone, litigation or agreements for damage to other people's property and no other regulation whatsoever.

>I view complaints such as ‘But this harms my property’ and ‘This will drive me out of business’ as very different.

And you have the right to do so! But apparently you would like to write this difference into law, requiring firms to accept the former and ignore the latter. Well, that may be your choice, but as a libertarian I cannot accept that as a legal requirement. Now, if the person who complains and the business can't work out their differences and go to court, then I *would* like the former complaint to be given more weight than the latter, basically because it is a more direct harm. (In a really free society, this would also be subject to negotiation, just prior negotiation.) But that's not what I'm talking about; what I'm talking about is the fact that a real person, making decisions for their own business, is much more likely to listen to *any* complaint than a fake person (a corporation), run by real people who are making decisions for the corporation instead of for themselves. After all, corporations are not known for paying attention to either of these complaints, the first or the second, without the threat of law behind them! People are different in this way.

>Why, and how can you assume that profit is necessarily a bad thing?

I never made that assumption! It is you, however, who seems to assume that it is necessarily a good thing. And more: that it is the *only* good thing. That's why you support a situation in which most large firms (being for-profit corporations) are chartered by the state to seek profit, in which the firm's managers are legally bound to ignore all other goods (within the law), as part of their fiduciary duty. I would make no such assumption. (Here, and in my earlier comments, I use ‘profit’ in the narrow sense; see below.)

>I eat food that could provide greater advantage to a homeless man, choosing food not on the basis of the environmental impact but on whether or not I like it. Is this immoral? No.

To me, yes, it's immoral, which is why I do things differently. When homeless men ask my for my food (and often when they don't), I give it to them. I avoid meat and prefer organic and locally grown produce (especially from my neighbour's garden), primarily for environmental reasons. To me, these are moral issues, because they affect the choices available to other people in society (including my future self), and that is why I make those decisions. You may make different decisions; I've never argued otherwise. But not everyone has your idea of morality.

>Should I be expected to sacrifice that?

I'm not sure why you're asking me what you should be expected to do. Do you mean that these luxuries might not be available to you if they weren't produced by corporations with government support? If that's so, then I guess that I would expect to sacrifice all of that, for approximately the same reasons (it seems to me) that you expect an outcompeted business to fail. So that must not be what you're asking; but then I don't see the point of that whole paragraph.

>Whatever values you think you have, your value is profit, its value is profit

That's simply not what I've been talking about. You can use the term ‘profit’ in a very broad sense, to mean whatever a person values, to allow you to apply economic theory to all of the decisions that people make (in which case you find that people are terribly irrational). Or you can use the term in a very narrow sense, to mean the net intake (revenue minus costs) of an entity with monetary accounts, which is relevant to the fiduciary duty of a corporation's managers. But these are two very different things! I have been talking, all along, about the latter (which I think is the ordinary usage of the term).

>Corporations aren't faceless, they are a collection of more faces than you could ever know

So I said. And yet (much like government bureaucracies) they seem faceless; how does that happen? Because of those faces —the actual people who make them up— have been hired to ignore all of their personal feelings and focus only on the bottom line (or whatever they were told). It is a kind of deliberate schizophrenia, and it is the reason for corporations' sociopathic behaviour.

FINALLY! It took me a whole year to start a thread which is later hijacked and used as a platform for loony ideas. I'm rather proud.

Well, it is a thread on politics.

I just don't want anybody thinking that I'm moderate on economic issues based on my score. I'm anti-government AND anti-corporation, so they kind of split me down the middle.

I cannot see the distinction between profit as in net intake and gain in value from an action as being a valid one. Just because one is in terms of money and the other in terms of material doesn't make them any different. Money is, after all, valuable only because of what it can buy.

>>Should I be expected to sacrifice that?

>I'm not sure why you're asking me what you should be expected to do. Do you mean that these luxuries might not be available to you if they weren't produced by corporations with government support? If that's so, then I guess that I would expect to sacrifice all of that, for approximately the same reasons (it seems to me) that you expect an outcompeted business to fail. So that must not be what you're asking; but then I don't see the point of that whole paragraph.
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The point of the paragraph was do point out that if you insist on the philosophy of giving money to everyone and anyone more in need than yourself, and actually carry it through, you end up with a truly rotten life.

You seem to have claimed that I want to have government supporting business. Far from it, I want government to leave business alone, to compete as they will.

The difference between us is that you seem to think that by virtue of my very existence I have a responsibility to others, am I correct in that?

I plan to respond to this eventually.

How long does it take for threads to lock?

wow you dug this one up

I guess so.

Gosh, and I never responded to TGM's last post! Shall I?

Actually, I want to respond to part of it just for the record, because it's important to me that people not think this about me:

>The difference between us is that you seem to think that by virtue of my very existence I have a responsibility to others, am I correct in that?

No, I most certainly do not think that.