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Member (Idle past 1498 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
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Author | Topic: Corporate Personhood | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Jon Inactive Member |
I'd like someone to talk me through the case against "corporate personhood" They aren't people. That was easy. JonLove your enemies!
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Jon Inactive Member |
In addition, there's nothing inherently irrational about deciding that a corporation may have some rights accorded to people (the right to own property and access to the courts) and still deciding that other rights (freedom of speech, for example) shall not be accorded to a corporation. And, of course, all these problems are easily solved by not recognizing non-people things as people.Love your enemies!
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Jon Inactive Member
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Speech is speech regardless of who the speaker is. And, of course, money isn't speech, regardless of who's spending it. JonLove your enemies!
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Jon Inactive Member |
Absent legal personhood a corporation doesn't exist before the law. So? Who cares?
There's nothing to bring a suit against. Absolute bullshit. 100% Crap. Any corporation is made up of people. People on top of people on top of other people. There are plenty of real people to sue in a corporation without pretending the corporation is a person of its own.Love your enemies!
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Jon Inactive Member |
Well apart from the fact that the corporation probably has more money, there is the problem that responsibility in a corporation is diffuse. Just make the head boss legally responsible by default, regardless of when he came on or how much hand he had in the making of the product, dumping of the toxic waste, etc. It then falls on him to prove that someone else is more responsible than he is. If he can't do that, then he's the one who goes to court. Jon Edited by Jon, : Coding errorLove your enemies!
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Jon Inactive Member |
if the corporation, having no legal existence Who said there would be no legal existence? Why must legal existence entail legal personhood? Why must lack of legal personhood rule out responsible parties? Does my property exist? Am I responsible for my property and what happens on it? Is my property a person?Love your enemies!
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Jon Inactive Member |
Jon writes: It then falls on him to prove that someone else is more responsible than he is. Well typically that's not going to be very difficult. What's Plan B? Sue that other person instead. JonLove your enemies!
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Jon Inactive Member |
Well apart from the difficulty of locating them, what if they don't have any assets? And that's a realistic problem. But I can see a system that works around such problems. For example, the head boss could be ultimately responsible by default, and so is always the party who gets sued; leaving it up to him to sue someone else he thinks is responsible. You end up with two separate cases, and the party injured by the product, toxic waste, etc. still gets their compensation, and the head boss can still seek his own damages from an underling who was perhaps intentionally acting against the company's policies and subverting its authority in enforcing those policies, or a third party that sold his company defective parts, etc. I'm not saying all the answers are straight forward, but I do think it is possible to run the system in such a way that doesn't grant legal personhood to some non-person entity and all the risks that go along with that. JonLove your enemies!
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Jon Inactive Member |
It should be pointed out that the legal personality of corporations does not prevent individuals within the corporation from being brought to book. Ask Ken Lay if you don't believe me. But what it does mean is that there is always something you can bring to book. And this is, I think, good. I think the owners/operators of these large companies will be more likely to evaluate their decisions and take necessary precautions to prevent damages from their companies' actions if they are personally responsible for those damages rather than hiding behind their faceless organizations. It's good that we can sue Shell for a cancer cluster that pops up near its refineries, but it'd be even better if the cancer cluster never happened in the first place because the head boss and managers of the company were all so afraid of going to prison for the rest of their miserable lives that they wouldn't dare make one sacrifice in overseeing the proper disposal and management of byproducts from the obviously deadly product that they trade in. A system built on personal, not corporate, responsibility, I think, incentives for much better behavior coming from large companies. JonLove your enemies!
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Jon Inactive Member |
For example, if the family breadwinner gets hit by a gasoline truck driven by an Exxon mobile employee, the principle of respndeat superior makes the employer vicariously liable for the driver's damages. The family gets full restitution from Exxon, who can in turn then seek compensation from the driver. That's something on the line of what I was getting at.
Vicarious liability is difficult to apply in cases where the injured party must find the employee or employees responsible before suing. It's even possible that no employee can be found to have committed an act that would make him personally liable. In that case, without ability to sue the corporation, injured parties cannot be compensated. This was the purpose of my proposal that the chief boss always be the one who is, by default, the party sued. If he owns/is in charge of the company, then he holds full responsibility for anything his company (which includes his employees, not just his material property) does. If he feels one of his employees acted contrary to their employment contract in causing the damages, then that is a separate case for him to pursue in seeking restitution from that employee. JonLove your enemies!
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Jon Inactive Member |
But what about cases where the company is public, the CEO owns only some shares in the company, and the injury is on the level of the Bhopal disaster. I consider ownership above management. The owners would be responsible by default.Love your enemies!
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