K: In numbers, yes. In employment, yes. In share of wealth & assets, no. Hence the problem...
N: There are too many layers in a corporation for it to be considered 'small'. 'Small' implies connection to all aspects of the business (from production to selling). Large businesses lose that, and therefore they lose accountability of the stages--that's where problems happen. It's the classic thing Hitler did when killing people...dividing up and isolating tasks...(i hope what i'm saying is clear).
B: Being able to successfully conduct almost all of the work of living using a minority of the total resources is desirable according to standard environmental movements and economic models. But in this case, we're not even discussing resources, but rather proxies for resources, all stored in abstract computer systems.
At a high level, does the friction come from imbalanced wealth and asset distribution, or with the inversion of the relationship between social and economic models embedded into our management systems. The total resources available more than meet the total needs of potential users. The top-level people in the system do not spend their days actively looking for ways to deprive individuals of access to the necessities of life. At the end of the day, they are all human and have enough of the generic kinds of graces and decencies that they maintain some semblance of generic human social function. The most heated arguments appear to be about how best to reconfigure the rules at the edges in order to conform to (evidently different) perceptions about the core ruleset.
I don't see any individual in the top tier enjoying more than one set of clothing, one meal, one party, or one habitation at one time. For anyone but the extreme bottom tier, the question concerns degree, rather than having or not having. As we know from centuries of manufacturing, formal rules are very good at restricting variation until something catastrophic happens.
If an explicit rules-based society is what we want (in keeping with the mechanistic Enlightenment paradigm), the rules to determine which corporations do or do not operate in a socially acceptable manner must operate repeatably. That is, the standards we apply to one corporation must be uniform across all other corporations of the same kind. In the past, we've designed rules around qualitative differences among corporations (monopoly, public, not-for-profit, charitable, professional, etc.). But under current classifications, it's not evident how Google (which knowingly sells bundles of ads that will mostly not be clicked) is different *in kind* from a firm that knowingly sells bundles of loans that will mostly not be repaid.
Closer to accountability, all but the smallest of organisations exhibit some specialisation and distribution of tasks because few individuals have the knowledge, skills, or time to do everything. Hence, each layer of functional or organisational abstraction costs some information and transparency, and hence, accountability. The problem of information and communication gaps is ubiquitous (and possibly scale-free).
This, I think, exposes one of the fatal assumptions we've been making: that wealth and assets as denominated or proxied in terms of money are conceptually or practically related to any social dimension. (This is not to say that there is no social dimension to wealth, but that the same social dynamics apply irrespective of particular wealth or lack thereof.)
Investment firms, politicians, or profiteers are not socially destructive because they have different bits in some database next to their names; they would be considered socially destructive because they exploit trust and incomplete information in their social relations with other humans. This wealth manifestation is a symptom or outcome, not a cause, of some deeper dynamic that begins with exploiting individuals.
tl;dr: If we believe the mechanistic relationship between input reactants (exploitation) and output products (wealth), removing product from the system would tend to drive the reaction forward (more exploitation). In contrast, if we want something other than a rules-based society, we would need to do something different in kind than adding or removing rules at the edges.
KM: Look at this week's Bloomberg Businessweek. Clearly the drivers of job creation are large corporations in any developed economy.
B: Perhaps you could summarise the evidence presented in this week's Businessweek instead of assuming that I will successfully guess at the specific references you want to cite?
In any case, "job creation" unlikely to be exclusively a top-down or bottom-up phenomena, and posing the question and assumptions as such only leads to unhelpful adversarial thinking. The vocations of most humans most of the time is to fulfill proximate needs identified locally, in the context of organizations of any size, including corporations, families, etc. that exist in some context. Now what forms that context?
With respect to economic employment, we need to eat, and can fulfill that need by creating the local role of the sole proprietorship corner grocer. Would that role be sustainable without being backstopped by a multi-trillion-dollar per month globally integrated supply chain? Would P&G be able to develop better products and serve new customers without being backstopped by the tens of thousands of low-volume distributors responsible for most of their administrative costs but almost none of their volume or earnings?
Contexts are necessarily co-created unless you believe society to be entirely technologically or socially constructed. Empirical evidence is against such deterministic interpretations. One cannot socially deconstruct a nuclear weapon any more than one can technologically construct a popular website at will.
T: Why should corporations exist at all, why give more economic rights to an abstract legal fiction than to actual people, and furthermore why set up an economic system which by its very structure subverts the political one?
B: Presently, the formal corporation affords us an entity to hold accountable when things go badly, and to continue desirable works when they do well. Otherwise, no city could reasonably procure a bridge from a skilled 60-year-old engineer, and we wouldn't have important multi-generational institutions like universities or hospitals.
More distantly, as a demand of the last major Western popular uprising, Cromwell et al. needed to keep track of the unlimited powers formerly held by the sovereign as exercised by Parliament. While the sovereign could more or less proclaim that such and such a group as identified ad hoc would be required to do X, this lead to rampant injustices. Codification into law was a convenient (but ultimately unsustainable) way to deal with this problem at the time. But formal laws could only act on formal legal persons, hence the need to create fictitious legal persons in corporate form. (One could consider Parliament itself as the prototypical corporate body with perpetual succession.)
There are certainly other-not a legally incorporated entity-ways to organise sustainable collective efforts while retaining some measure of accountability (several non-idolatrous open source projects seem to get this right [those with founder syndrome appear generally less sustainable]), but the public attitude has not been favourable toward more mainstream efforts from the Vatican, AQ, HA, Eastern syndicates, etc. Perhaps the current protestors could even explore some ways to demonstrate new ways of organisation that would be acceptable to society at large, even though they would not share in many of the basic assumptions that underpin current adoration of the rule of law.
Of course, that would also require us to break with key mechanistic and scientistic assumptions about how our society should work. Current persistently loud demands from both corporations and their opponents that legislators reform corporate law at primarily at the edges indicates that most stakeholders are not prepared to have that discussion.
T: I really don't know where your coming from with Corporations being the saviors of modern society. I don't understand why all this vital infrastructure relies on corporate identity. LAst time I checked you don't need a corporation to build a bridge or hospital.
T: There is an inherent different in the identity of Parliament and a corporations, namely that they have different constituencies, the parliament is vested in the creation fo legislation for the perpetuation of Peace Order and Good Government, whereas corporations are only beholden to their share holders. What is a non-Idolatrous open source project?
24 October at 21:09 · Like
T: What ever happened to small companies, locally run, owned, managed etc.? I think there is a lack of alternative solutions and there needs to be more development here, I for one would establish asa fundamental principle of how a society should function, that it not be suicidal and self destructive. The current system fails on this respect. ergo change is needed. But we stray, the initial point was whether or not corporations are owned by the middle class. I would contend that ownership and management are different. I myself have owned shares at various times and at no time did I feel as though I ran the companies, or my votes at share holders meetings were relevant. Why? Because the majority voters are the elite, rich, or massive hedge-funds managed by the elite and wealthy....
D: T - question for you: do you understand the reasoning behind Corporate personhood?
T: Whose reasoning?
