Andy wrote:
An example popped into my head about how mythical the economic system is, the very fact that corporations are treated as people under the law. A corporation is a person, isn't that unbelievable? They have all the protections, none of the liabilities.They don't have all of the protections of a real person. Corporations are not "emancipated." They have to be owned by people; they can't own themselves. (Not yet, anyway.) Although I must admit that I don't understand economics either, especially when companies start buying up their own stock. It would seem to me that there is no legal reason why a company could not buy up ALL of its own stock, and thereby be emancipated, owning itself, a TRUE Frankenstein.
As it is, nobody really knows what they own anyway, so "ownership" is no longer a real idea.
For example: I have a retirement plan that I paid into for 30 years. That money goes to a state retirement fund that invested it somewhere, but I don't really know the details. Some of was probably in a mutual fund, that bought stock in individual companies. So technically I probably "own" part of McDonald's or General Motors, but I have absolutely ZERO sense of ownership, zero sense of responsibility. It's quite possible for some companies to be majority owned by such third parties, which means the "stockholders" have no idea they are stockholders, and have no responsibility whatsoever to the public or to the company.
Corporations can "die;" in fact, they almost always do. That's the only thing I took away from reading a very old computer magazine called BOARD TALK, about Bulletin Boards. The owner/editor pointed out that ALL companies die at some time; the only thing a company can do is to extend its lifespan by a few years by being subsumed under a larger company ("eaten," as it were, and thus dying as an individual entity) or by splitting into smaller units, which then can continue on until they die. Mitosis of companies does not produce huge colonies of the same individual company, though; at best, the split entities last for a while longer until they are eaten.A corporation will never sit on death row, will never pay child support.
And bankruptcy is really a corporate death; the estate sale disposes of all the assets of the dead "person." That's one reason going to Border's last month of increasingly discounted sales was so depressing; it was like going to the estate sale of a good friend.
On the rare occasion it is prosecuted, its CEO's die in prison of natural causes, that's about it. We need to redefine success to something in keeping with the laws of gravity.On VERY rare occasions, companies can be "executed" by the state. They can be "dis-banded" by non-natural causes when they behave so badly towards the public that they lose all rights to continue as a corporate entity.
