Phydeaux
Posts: 4828
Joined: 1/4/2004
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ORIGINAL: MrRodgers
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ORIGINAL: Phydeaux
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ORIGINAL: MrRodgers
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ORIGINAL: Phydeaux
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ORIGINAL: MrRodgers
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ORIGINAL: Phydeaux
Hence demonstrating that you haven't the *foggiest* idea about corporations.
Corporations let you pool assets, and form both liabilities and profits. This is perhaps the biggest benefit of a corporation. One person has capital - another person has artistic ability - poof a movie production company is formed. Or twenty people pool their funds to buy income producing property.
Second. Corporations are allowed to expense thinks done with a business purpose. Own a car by a company - payment is a deductible expense. Own it individually - not a chance.
Corporations have different tax structures and reporting requirements. Publicly owned - then you then your books are public record, and you have significant reporting requirements. You also have a lower top tax bracket.
Have a single big asset - but lots of family? A corporation gives a method to control inheritance.
Starting a company can qualify you for foreign citizenship.
In other cases, corporations allow you shield your privacy - which I get it - you don't like it. But its a useful function none the less. Donald Trump may not want the publicity of an investment in oil. Setup a private company and run the investment through the company.
Companies can act as a loci, to rationalize and specialize. Suppose company x buys company y. It could then split out all food holdings into company z. The executive in put in charge will have food experience. Movie holdings and solar energy can be broken out into their own structures.
And this barely scratches the surface.
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Whatever business that can be conducted via a corporation can also be, by a private partnership or sole proprietorship which maintains and retains an individual and collective (within the business) financial liability. Hence the creation a few years ago of the LLC, the 'Limited liability' company. A partnership or proprietorship that can limit financial and criminal liability as identified by its very name.
It is an expressly legal given that corporations get away with real criminal acts and financial crimes and survive because as the perpetrator. a corp. and has no individual liability and are only subject to fine and civil sanction.
Bullshit again. Plenty of corporate owners have been prosecuted for illegal activity. And gone to jail. Michael Milliken - the junk bond king. Bernie Maddox.
1744 bankers in the savings and loans debacle in the 80's. The fact that democrats don't want to prosecute their buddies is the fault of democrats, not the law.
And notice the 'C' at the end of LLC? Stands for company. Yep, and LLC is still a company - which you apparently hate. In fact, LLP's, LLC's, Sub-S, Sub-C - they are all (really) just specialized companies.
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Corporations regularly file for bankruptcy and are reorganized to have debt eliminated, something a private partnership or individual cannot do.
Of course they can. Individuals protections vary by state, but generally speaking individuals can shield more assets than corps. House, car, tools of trade etc.
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The corporation is prolific at creating private wealth for its investors only
Right. The purpose of a business is to create wealth. Yah!
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and most often at the expense of society at large
Um, no. Society creates the rules that say under what circumstances a corporation may operate. Regardless of the fact that you don't like it - corporations make your shoes, make your food, make your bed, make your house. Corporations bring you seafood, and power, and your healthcare.
Sounds like a huge benefit to me.
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have no commercial or social so-called compact with society the costly and immoral exception being, the legal framework and protections that society is forced to provide it by law and in being just that, represents the last authoritarian institution of, are legally and morally, the antithesis of, a free country.
Oh and BTW, the founding fathers did not and for the ensuing 60 -70 years, nobody wanted the corporation knowing full well its corruption on society
blah blah blah .. Wrong again.
Google it. Most of the founding father participated in corporations. Washington participated in corporations to build canals, and drain swamps for example.
As for absolving responsibility - no one believes that - so saying hamilton is against as if you just knocked down a real argument.. well its ridiculous.
All of those things you suggest is the reason to form a corporation, can be formed by a partnership or sole proprietorship. It is you that obviously have no knowledge whatsoever about the original corporate regime formed in the US
blah blah blah
Which means you went and read an article about the history of corporations. Big deal. Many of the restrictions you comment - like corporations had to turn over their books - are still in existence, and still used. Many corporations have to file annual corporate reports in the state they are incorporated in.
As for the rest. Corporations form the vast majority of the things you eat, wear, use, play with. The idea that a partnership or sole proprietorship is an appropriate vehicle to mkae a company that will need to invest tens of billions of dollars for tools and dies - is ridiculous.
Come back when you have some real word experience and know something about the field.
So what if I read an article about the history of the corporation. I surely didn't just make it up like far too many here do.
Look it's far too easy to simply throw shit out here in rather ridiculous attempts to impugn someone's knowledge and without foundation but all of those things, products and services can be provided without being incorporated. It is a simple as that. A few companies are still unincorporated. Having incorporated, studied the subject, I know that I know more than enough to impugn [their] character...or lack of it.
Those billion$ you mention are the billion$ all too often used to enrich management and fuck lenders and investors. (SEE: corporation, see; Enron, WorldCom see Waste-management Inc. which tried for years to 'make-a-living' at simply and repeatedly going bankrupt)
Of course you miss the point that the courts now have judged the corporation to be something it most certainly is not and thus has thrown out almost all of the laws meant to protect society from their power both economically and politically.
Jefferson wrote in 1825 to William Branch Giles of "vast accession of strength from their younger recruits, who having nothing in them of the feelings or principles of ’76 now look to a single and splendid government of an Aristocracy, founded on banking institutions and monied in corporations under the guise and cloak of their favored branches of manufactures commerce and navigation, riding and ruling over the plundered ploughman and beggared yeomanry." Sounds quite familiar to me.
“I hope that we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”
Both— Thomas Jefferson.
Look mate.
This was cutting edge debate 250 years ago. If you bother to remember your 7th grade social studies you will recall that popular opinion was divided between the whigs and the democrats. Google Jeffersonian democracy. Jefferson was on the side of planters, yeoman farmers - he was a pastorialist.
The fact that he wrote about how horrible industry was is hardly surprising. But nor is it representative of US thinking as a whole. So don't try to pass it off as such.
But the fact is as much as Jefferson wanted us to remain a nation of slave-owning farmers - the nation moved on. Indeed, I suggest you google the term Yankee Ingenuity. And perhaps you might want to read the history of the industrial revolution in america. Read about lowell and tifton
So while I get that anti-corporatism is endemic in the extreme left - don't fool yourself that you reflect a majority of american thinking.
Jefferson's comments had nothing to do with the corporations function but to its power to corrupt, both people...and govt. Plus he wasn't alone.
Even before the revolution, recognizing the threat corporations could pose to government, the English monarchs kept a close eye on these organizations and did not hesitate to revoke charters if they didn’t like the way things were going. However, as the money piled up in these companies, they began to take on increased political power and influence.
A corporation now not only enjoys many of the same protections as a person under our law but is crafted to remove obligations a person would ordinarily have but for the shield of the corporate entity such as personal liability for a corporation’s bad behavior.
In 1827, James Madison, known as the father of the Constitution, wrote that "incorporated companies with proper limitations and guards may, in particular cases, be useful; but they are at best a necessary evil only."
James Madison warned that inequality in property ownership would subvert liberty, either through opposition to wealth (a war of labor against capital) or “by an oligarchy founded on corruption” through which the wealthy dominate political decision-making (a war of capital against labor).
John Adams favored distribution of public lands to the landless to create broad-based ownership of property, then the critical component of business capital in the largely agricultural U.S. Current levels and trends in inequality would almost certainly have terrified the founders, who believed that broad-based property ownership was essential to the sustenance of a republic.
(this is where your pilgrim analogy fails as compared to today because the Gov. of Plymouth Co. GAVE 1 acre of land to everybody. something never dreamed of today and in addition to that, the Indians taught the white man how to grow corn which quickly became worth more then silver)
John Adams also had an opinion. “Banks have done more injury to the religion, morality, tranquility, prosperity, and even wealth of the nation than they can have done or ever will do good.”
In his 1833 message to Congress, Jackson asked whether the American people are to govern through their elected representatives or "whether the money and power of a great corporation are to be secretly exerted to influence their judgment and control their decisions."
In his 1837 message to Congress, President Martin Van Buren warned of "the already overgrown influence of corporate authorities."
Face it man, you continue to grasp at straws, the modern corporation of today, is the anathema forceed upon a free and prosperous society.
So we are to rely on the words of madison hmmm. Even tho in the past when I gave you quotes of madison regarding the necessary function of government was to be limited - you discarded his words then.
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As Madison and his fellows understood it, government exists simply to secure the rights with which nature and nature's God had endowed us. The wide plain of human existence was to be unhemmed by fences of government intervention. We are granted the unalienable right to work out the fullness of our lives, liberties, and pursuits of happiness. Government neither creates nor assigns rights and obligations, its sole function is the protection of those rights via the powers afforded it in the Constitution
But no matter. Lets quote Madison on business, shall we, since thats the topic at hand?
This, from Madison's address to the house of representatives, while he served:
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I own myself the friend to a very free system of commerce, and hold it as a truth, that commercial shackles are generally unjust, oppressive and impolitic — it is also a truth, that if industry and labor are left to take there own course, they will generally be directed to those objects which are the most productive, and this in a more certain and direct manner than the wisdom of the most enlightened legislature could point out.
Kind of blows at 'grasping at straws' now doesn't it?
I never said Jefferson was the ONLY pastorialist. I said he didn't represent the views of the United States - only one faction within the United States.
I also showed you where Washington- and others - owned shares in corporations. Indeed, *most* of the signers of the constitution were wealthy men, most of them participated in corporations.
Finally, you cherry pick quotations and attempt to present it as if was unanimously anticorporation, since its inception. This is a blatant false hood. Many of the founders were ardent churchment - who believed charging interest on a loan was unchristian. Their opposition to a bank is not to be confused with opposition to corporations.
Jackson was the leading member of the BlountOverton group - a group of leading businessmen in Nashville.
Here is an excerpt from Jackson's entry in encyclopedia.com:
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During the nineteenth century, Americans accommodated republicanism's precapitalistic bias to the dramatic changes in transportation, communication, and economic activity that have been called the Market Revolution. Especially after the War of 1812, Americans acknowledged that it was no longer possible or even desirable to maintain a rigid agrarian social order. They increasingly accepted as beneficial certain material and moral aspects of a developing economy. Economic ambition, for example, need not breed only luxury and corruption; it could also promote industriousness, frugality, and other republican virtues. Nevertheless, many Americans continued to harbor anxieties that the emerging world of commerce, banking, and manufacturing endangered the conditions essential to maintain liberty. In short, the language of republicanism remained potent throughout the Jacksonian era, but its diagnosis of the condition of the American republic was subject to different interpretations.
These ideas left their mark on Jackson. It was evident in his highly moralistic tone; his agrarian sympathies; his devotion to the principles of states' rights and limited government; and his fear that speculation, moneyed interests, and human greed would corrupt his country's republican character and institutions. At the same time, he was not a rigid traditionalist. He accepted economic progress, a permanent and expanding Union with sovereign authority, and democratic politics. His philosophy, therefore, brought together the not entirely compatible ideals of economic progress, political democracy, and traditional republicanism.
Hardly paints him - or America- as you have sought to do.
You are cherrypicking quotes to try to fabricate the idea that the US was anti-corporation. And as I said, while there were periods that the US was more anti-corporation, to say that we always were is simply wrong.
Again - you don't grow your own food, pave your own roads, generate your own electricity. Why then should you try to cling to one idea of the way the US was 300 years ago. Your polemics are unpersuasive. But you are welcome to go off into the wilderness somewhere, milk your own cows, do your own dentristy, and make your own clothes. Just don't expect many to follow you.
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RE: Economic rights...is there such a right ? - 
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