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Comment by krageon | Hacker News Reader

> companies are people

They're not

In U.S. law, corporations exist in a bizarro-world state where they are people for some purposes where it's advantageous (to take advantage of free speech, for example), but not people where it's disadvantageous (for liability and punishment, for example; there is the meme "I'll believe that a corporation is a person when Texas executes one!"). I believe that is what GP is referring to.

It's not just us law. Most countries have the ability for corporations to act as their own entity under the protection of the law. This is because companies need to sign things, like contracts, that can't be secured by any one person.

Corporations can be held liable and punished, they can be forced to declare bankruptcy and forced to dissolve. I would call that execution.

The entire purpose of Corporate Personhood is to apply these disadvantageous purposes to a corporate entity. It is also to limit liability on the stakeholders, so that if you start a company, and the company goes south, your creditors can't destroy your life by taking all of your personal assets.

But when there is actual criminal activity, the liability protection of the corporation can be completely ignored and individual bad actors can be pursued in the courts. This is called "Piercing the corporate veil"[0].

Legal personhood is a legal fiction that has been granted to innumerous "entities" including the environment itself (see, for example, the Ganges River's personhood[1]. Furthermore, it does not grant full personhood for obvious reasons. A legal person cannot vote or be represented in government.

I'm a liberal democrat, but god do these "Corporations aren't people" memes make me cringe. Things like limited liability and corporate personhood not only allow for incredible economic growth through financial innovation, but also provide benefit to individuals harmed by the corporation. If a corporation didn't have legal personhood, how else could a victim sue the entity and receive a settlement? The only "people" they could sue would be individual stakeholders.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piercing_the_corporate_veil [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_person#Examples

FWIW, I think most of the real complains about legal personhood is that the punitive aspects aren't applied enough. Yes, there is "corporate death penalty", but it's hardly ever given out. And when the corporate veil is being pierced, it often seems the people stabbed are scapegoats placed in front of the blade by those who were truly responsible, and who get to still hide safely behind the veil.

I agree with that, 100%, but that's valid criticism, not CoRpOrAtIoNs ArEn'T PeOpLe.

Also, the group of people who actually are the corporation ate free to go do the same things again.

Fiduciary equivalent of qualified immunity.

“Things like limited liability and corporate personhood not only allow for incredible economic growth through financial innovation…”

“Nonsense layered on nonsense layered on nonsense enables people to trade goods and services!”

Because we did not have those natural abilities before these laws.

The past literally happened. But similar to how America decided they were not British anymore, there’s little natural reason to LARP 1900’s capitalists except to kowtow to politically approved assessment of our agency.

Maybe it made sense when the average person could not read or write, but we’re a bit beyond that point.

> “Nonsense layered on nonsense layered on nonsense enables people to trade goods and services!”

We traded before the invention of currency, too, but not very much because it wasn't very efficient.

We started companies before the invention of financing, too, but not as many because it was hard to fund a company unless you were rich.

So no, fictitious legal frameworks for economics are not nonsense, they are innovations, and allow for more economic growth and prosperity. They are "financial technology" in a very real sense.

As I said, they made sense in the past. We’ve also moved on from social constructs before. Our biology pushes us to forget the past innately; we need to update our cognitive software.

Economics is a meta-analysis of natural human behavior. It’ll be true that we behave that way without the analysis. The value in that analysis is for behavioral management, not people.

We need not empower “economists” politically, or enable protectionism as a result of their insights, which enriches a minority unfairly, and provides them means of to participate in political corruption (see Yellen getting money from banks and being all anti crypto).

We absolutely have no natural or legal obligation to capitalism, as we’re actually a socialist system, where negotiations make the decisions; it’s just they’re gated and flow to industrialists.

We moved on from rotary phones and horse n buggy as science and technical discovery enabled it. We can certainly move on from favoring ephemeral currency being our economic motivator.

This forum is all “disrupt!” and I keep seeing the same few coming out on top. Keep disrupting.

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