Personally, I think the metphysics is misguided, and we might as well admit that corporations are not fictional but real, just like lots of other collective entities. I am not a methodological individualist.
If the real objection is to granting corporations rights as persons in the sense of the Fourteenth Amendment, then we should start there, not with a metaphysical point. The 14A isn't about metaphysics, it is about politics. And morality.
--- Jon Johanning <jjohanning at igc.org> wrote:
> On Friday, April 2, 2004, at 08:57 PM, andie
> nachgeborenen wrote:
>
> > Depends on accountancy and corporate policy --
> some of
> > the cost is imposed on the shareholders, who also
> > legal fictions, since they own shares ofa
> fiction,
> > some on consumers if the taxes are passed alomg in
> > terms of prices, etc.
>
> I am a total dunce on these higher financial
> matters, but it seems to
> me that shareholders are not legal fictions --
> they're real people. And
> if they get the taxes passed on to them, it must
> result in their not
> receiving some actual, real money that they would
> have gotten if the
> burden had been passed on to someone else. Or am I
> missing something?
>
> Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org
> __________________________________
> A gentleman haranguing on the perfection of our law,
> and that it was
> equally open to the poor and the rich, was answered
> by another, 'So is
> the London Tavern.' -- "Tom Paine's Jests..."
> (1794); also attr. to
> John Horne Tooke (1736-1812) by Hazlitt
>
> ___________________________________
>
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Small Business $15K Web Design Giveaway http://promotions.yahoo.com/design_giveaway/