A library is loaning you property, usually collateral-free. A corporation is just a placeholder essentially for the activities it will perform, each of which will likely have far more stringent requirements than a library card.
A corporation's activities are unknowable but not being a real person it is not entitled to an assumption of good faith and there is no particular right to create new legal entities. We should definitely know who the beneficial owners of any corporation are to reduce the potential for fraud.
Does this exact argument not apply to the "anonymous" corporations mentioned in the article?
The article was about the ease of setting up series of shell companies, which can easily move money around the world in a hard-to-detect way in order to conceal profits made by people, with no way to determine who those people are or what their tax obligations are.
Part of the administrative overhead is making sure they get the books back.
You don't even need a library card to use materials as often as you want; you only need a card to remove materials.
Unknowable without knowing who you actually are
Long ago, a corporate charter required an act of the state legislature to authorize it. Obviously that’s a heavy handed approach, but the idea that any agent of any person or other entity can anonymously create a company is ridiculous.
A corporation is a legal entity which can engage in some of the same contracts as people can, because its entire purpose is to serve as a legal framework for organizing economic activity. In primitive societies, economic activities must be organized around flesh and blood people, like nobility. Corporations are much more flexible and efficient in achieving these aims. This legal structure, like many others, has massively improved human welfare since its invention by allowing people to pool and deploy resources and power in flexible ways. It beats depending on a rich guy to finance and organize everything himself.
If having this legal status makes a corporation a person, a country would also have to be a fictitious person. So would the UN, and the EU, and the AU. So would every government agency and every province and state in every country. A whole world of fictitious people! Except they're not, any more than my dog is a child because she has a birth certificate and an immunization record, just like a child.
Please, let's let this 'corporations are people' myth die.
Many government entities are fictitious persons. All public authorities are, and many agencies. I’m unsure of how a sovereign state compares to a corporation legally.
Your dog is entirely different. It is a chattel, or your personal property. Your dog has no agency, ownership of anything, etc.
https://www.uscis.gov/i-9-central/acceptable-documents
If I missed something, can you point me to it?
Read page 4 for an actual side by side comparison.
You’ll see that all you really need to get a library card is present a form of identification, and perhaps a utility bill to prove your current address. Whereas for registering a corporation:
” No state requires any information about the person(s) who directly or indirectly own or control the company (often referred to as a beneficial owner)”
... along with many other similarly surprising statements that establish not even a low bar, but the absence of a bar at all.
How does that make any sense when, as the report highlights, those shell corporations - that is corporations whose placeholder status is used in itself to realize some gain, and thus never have to meet “more stringent requirements” - can then be used for “tax evasion, shady campaign contributions, cigarette smuggling, and weapons dealing”?
And in the US, to continue that example, there are multiple agencies and thousands of pages of regulations overseeing tax accounting and campaign finance. Sure, tons of shady shit still happens... but not because the criminals happened to file as an LLC instead of as sole proprietors.