It's worse than that. I think it's fair to say that the personification of corporations has been central to Western jurisprudence itself for, what, 200 years now? The idea of chartering a business as an immortal entity that imposes only the most nominal (literally limited, i.e., "Ltd.") responsibilities on its owners has to be one of the most stunningly effective means of eliminating accountability ever devised.
Carl Remick
-----Original Message----- From: Carrol Cox [mailto:cbcox at mail.ilstu.edu] Sent: Wednesday, August 12, 1998 5:37 PM To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com Subject: Re: Soft privatization
Max Sawicky wrote:
>
> You could also describe it as a policy founded
> on being free in all respects of the very same
> State which is routinely excoriated in these quarters.
Max rather quickly descends into nonsense, and rather brutal nonsense, when he strays far from technical economics. The Cato Institute (and all other libertarians that I have ever met) counts corporations as persons. It is impossible to defend the freedom of corporations without (fairly consciously) approving of the suppression of the freedom of individual humans. And "disagreeing" with that philosophy is not sufficient to separate one from the material reality of the Cato institute, which is the approval of mass murder so long as the visible agent of such murder is a "citizen" (i.e., corporation) rather than an overt arm of the state. As far as workers at Cato being nice people, we are coming awfully close to observing that after all, Hitler liked animals. Surely the oil and chemical companies whose "civil rights" Cato defends have murdered more people than all the individualist terrorists of the last 50 years combined.
Carrol