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Comment by joelfried | Hacker News Reader

A corporation is a legal entity created on paper to allow people to do business more effectively.

Corporations don't do anything, the people in them do.

People working at GM didn't act to fix their vehicles and people died.

People at PG&E chose not to perform actions based upon inspection data, and people died when their infrastructure failed.

According to your Jacobin article, people at Coca Cola killed those trade unionists.

How about let's not let the legal wrapper for people protect those who murder others?

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"Prosecuting individual actors" and "treating corporations as hostile entities" are not mutually exclusive; indeed I'd say we should all strive to do both.

A major point of establishing a corporation is the liability shield it grants. Sometimes it doesn't work (google piercing the corporate veil) but, the whole idea is to grant indemnity to people within a corporation for the corporation's actions.

I agree, people within corporations need to be held responsible for their actions.

But a big part of why that isn't happening is that when people kill people from behind the shield of a corporation, we can't even get people to agree that anything should be done about it, because "they were just following incentives". And any attempt to change the incentives is met with "but how can they do business if they're expected to comply with these onerous regulations" or "but that's socialism!". Instead, we're just supposed to trust that if it made money for a corporation it must have been good, because the invisible hand of the market would never allow it to be otherwise.

Until we break the idea that corporations are good by default, it's going to be hard to persuade people that going after people within a corporation for their wrongdoing is a good idea.

I agree and hope that by talking about it like this openly and publicly that maybe others who haven't learned this lesson can do so.

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