From: Wei Dai (weidai@eskimo.com)
Date: Sun Sep 03 2000 - 18:32:44 MDT
On Sun, Sep 03, 2000 at 05:27:09PM -0400, James Wetterau wrote:
> Hal wrote:
> ...
> > Corporations are a matter of people getting together cooperatively to
> > organize their efforts. How can it be evil for a group of people to
> > voluntarily organize, and to offer jobs to others? Every aspect of
> > the process, from the formation of the corporation, to the job offer,
> > to the acceptance, is voluntary and agreed to by all concerned.
> ...
There must be opportunities in the world for making profits while doing
evil. The corporation as a form of relatively efficient organization
allows more of these opportunities to be accessed.
A lot of evil contributed to big corporations seem to consist of
situations where two parties voluntarily cooporate on some effort, but
because one of the parties is in a significantly weaker bargaining
position (because of market conditions, lack of information, or
whatever), most of the benefit deriving from the effort goes to the other
party (i.e. shareholders of the corporation). Is it evil to take
advantage of other people, even though they would prefer that you did?
> The only difference in the two instances could be that in the first
> case the business might be a simple partnership, and in the second
> case it was a corporation, having duly filed "articles of
> incorporation" with the secretary of state of the state of
> Massachusetts. And therefore in one case I can recover damages from
> the business owners and in the other case I might not. This strikes
> me as something which materially affects me to which I never agreed.
That is true, but what is your proposed alternative? Do you seriously
suggest eliminating liability limitation for corporations? What about
the liability limitation represented by personal bankruptcies?
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