BY KELLEY CURRAN
Corporations loom large in our lives. We work for corporations and obtain what we need from them.
Corporations as a group are demonized, particularly when they’re the corporations that send American jobs overseas or get their industry capitalized like Big Oil and Big Tobacco. Individual, iconic corporations are celebrated.
Corporations have also loomed large in headlines and opinion pieces in recent months. Most recently, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision that corporations had essentially the same constitutional free speech rights as individual Americans and, therefore, could spend big to influence elections.
The decision has been viewed warily and even elicited an awkward admonishment by the president to the court while they were sitting in the audience of his State of the Union address.
The health care debate that consumed so much of the last year often boiled down to a debate on the merits of capitalism. Capitalism is and was consistently equated with overly powerful corporate interests by critics.
The clash of views on capitalism vs. Democratic socialism is often framed by liberals as a clash or tension between corporations and government, but that is really a strange way to look at the contrast.
So here’s a question, and it’s for two groups of folks, pro-government progressives or liberals who believe we need government to save us from the corporations and small-government conservatives who support the idea of corporations being treated as citizens.
Where do corporations come from?
Come on, guys, why aren’t more hands being raised and less heads being scratched? You have such strong opinions on this, you must have given it some thought. How are corporations made? What is a corporation? It seems some of you know but aren’t wanting to say.
Corporations come from government.
Encarta Dictionary offers three definitions of a corporation. First, “group regarded as individual by law.” It explains further, “a company recognized by law as a single body with its own powers and liabilities, separate from those of the individual members.”
The second definition is “the governing authority of an incorporated municipality, such as a city or town.” There’s then a catch-all definition of “group acting as a single entity.”
The conservative Supreme Court majority which gave corporations personhood status with First Amendment rights seemingly indulged in fuzzy math, perhaps calculating the sum of a group of people as equal to their number plus one.
They’re individuals with rights. They each get a fraction of another set of the same rights because they are members of a group. The group gets a set of rights of its own. Now that’s cause to scratch your head.
A corporation is a thing literally created by an act of government that allows an individual or group of individuals to reduce their costs and risks to conduct the activity of their choice. It is a statutory creation of a protected elite.
Joe Rockefeller and Bob Trump have a charter from the state creating the corporation of R&T; Plumbing Services Inc. Joe Brown and Bob Jackson are two proprietors of J&B; Plumbing Co. Both sets of partners have recently experienced losses or lawsuits worth way more than the companies. In the first partners’ case, R&T; goes bankrupt and its Joe and Bob move on, but for J&B;, it’s Joe Brown and Bob Jackson that go bankrupt.
Thomas Jefferson said it was men that were created equal and had inalienable rights. Not things, men, and those were equal rights, not extra ones if you form a corporation.
Inalienable rights means you were born with them. They can’t be separated from you. How does a thing created by government gets unalienable rights the government can’t violate? Surely a government can then just create a thing without such rights. An “originalist” or “strict constructionist” justice is not somehow required to find corporations have rights equal to citizens.
It’s also illogical to bash capitalism and promote stronger government by pointing to the evil or abuses of corporations. In fact, it’s absurd. It is the state you guys are looking to for salvation that created the beast you distrust. It is the government that says how these state-created entities operate, it creates the special tax breaks, it doles out the contracts and privatization schemes that redistribute our income to them.
Corporate charters are actually counter to the idea of a free market. Giving some individuals engaged in economic activity special rights tinkers with the market in a way a true free market economy has no reason to tolerate.
The very justification of corporations is to spread out risk. We’ve certainly seen how well some large corporations have managed to succeed in that in recent years. Those who want to equate evil corporations with capitalism have been provided a lot of ammunition. Yet to believe government is the answer requires some creative logic.
The government dictated exactly what corporations could do. The government then told us the corporations had gotten so large and so wiggled their tentacles into our very lives, we had no choice but to give them hundreds of billions of our dollars so they could, it would appear, register record profits and pay themselves sweet bonuses in a few months.
While getting wrapped up in imaginary battles between the government and corporations, we are distracted from the real threat of ever using the law to give some individuals power or advantage over others.
Jeffersonville resident Kelley Curran noticed that asking people where corporations come from is like asking where babies come from — they’re embarrassed to talk about it. Write to kelinawriterhat@aol.com
