>Last night, I caught a bit of Richard Grossman giving a talk at
>U. Colorado, Boulder. He and Frank T. Adams put out a booklet called
>"Taking Care of Business" (Charter Ink, 1995). I thought his speech
>was quite stirring, though he seems firmly in the populist-style
>"Let's control corporations" rather than the "Why should they exist at
>all" camp.
>
>Earth Island Journal printed a short version of the above booklet,
>available at http://www.ratical.com/corporations/TCoBeij.html.
>
>I think this sort of stuff is very valuable, especially in the age of
>MAI, even if it does not call for a fundamental restructuring of the
>economy. What are Elbowers' opinions of Grossman?
The history of the corporate form in that booklet is very useful, and it's nice to be reminded that the early U.S. economy was not the paradise of laissez faire that propagandists would have us believe. (State legislatures often wrote strict performance standards into early corporate charters.) But I still can't get a sense of how Adams & Grossman imagine the political movement necessary to get the kind of corporate charter reform they want, nor do I understand exactly what they want to put in place of The Corporation. And this is after interviewing Grossman two or three times and reading stuff he's written since the booklet.
Doug