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Comment by loup-vaillant | Hacker News Reader

"Fair" should not even be on the vocabulary when talking about what we should do to companies. Companies aren't people. What we do to them is secondary to whatever we do to actual people.

Now, how a split would affect the people involved, that's another story. But if you weight the number of people in those companies, versus the number of people they affect worldwide, well… the moral weight of the company is a rounding error. The only thing that really counts is how stuff like a split would affect the rest of the world. And if it means putting those four companies out of business, well, tough luck. The greater good must prevail. And even then, there are ways to compensate for the subsequent spike in unemployment.

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You most certainly heard about a thing called "law". In short, it's a paper that limits actions of everyone, including the government, to some known safe subset.

Arbitrarily breaking the law, that is, limiting the so-called "rights" of people, is considered bad, that very law prohibits it. You cannot just go and prevent somebody from doing a thing not prohibited by the law, such as carrying an iPhone, because suddenly you realize that you need to grab the iPhone and split it to pieces to make the world as a whole a better place.

Same applies to other properties, like companies. Unless owners of these are breaking the law, you can't grab and split their companies, because you consider it a greater good.

Of course, there were numerous examples when people ignored law and did arbitrary things, because "revolutionary conscience", "divine right of kings", or just plain having a gun as an argument. While merits of these options can be discussed, they all are incompatible with "rule of law", let alone "democracy", that many hood dear and consider the very soil on which the economic prosperity has grown. (We have most of Africa and Central Asia as a control group.)

All true, but please allow for the fact that certain kinds of market practices are against the law in certain jurisdictions and some of the companies mentioned have already been found guilty of these.

Also allow that laws may be changed.

Yes, laws may and should eventually change.

The process of changing laws is usually relatively slow, and involves discussing various consequences the change may have. I just wish this process was applied in the case.

> Arbitrarily breaking the law

…is a separate notion from fairness. Looks like you've read way too much in my comment.

Incidentally, laws can lawfully be changed.

A company is a group of people. Why should a group of people be treated differently than an individual?

A corporation is not a group of people, it is a body in itself. This is fundamental to the concept of a corporation.

We can consider the rights of the various stakeholders of the company, consumers, shareholders, employees, neighbours and suppliers. But the idea that the corporation itself has anything equivalent to human rights is very distasteful.

The idea of corporate personhood is a thing in US law at least, but it is the idea that the corporation is a person, not that it is a group of people.

I don't agree with the idea that any type of company is a body in itself, or that it should be considered a person under law. It's a group of people who work together to achieve common goals.

The concept of rights doesn't even apply, in the same way that "society" doesn't have rights. Individuals have rights. Taking money from a company means taking money from the people who own it. It doesn't exist apart from them. Making it seem so just makes it easier to violate the rights of the individuals involved.

To me, it's as ridiculous as things like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._$124,700_in_U...

While you may be right, something about what you said just sounds so Orwellian and terrifying.

I omitted the part where you don't just kill a homeless person to take his organs and save 5 other people. Of course due process has value.

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