On Mon, 8 Nov 1999, curious wrote:
> how exactly is a corporation "protected" as a class?
I misstated (I'm trying to do too much this morning..sorry) --
Corporations aren't protected, they protect people -- specifically the
people who make and implement the 'corporate' decisions -- i.e. if I,
Vinnie, choose to break a law, I, Vinnie, get punished. If a corporation
breaks a law (meaning the people behind the corporation) the corporation
gets smacked (and it's rather limited what you can do...often times fines
don't even make a dent in the increased profitability of rule breaking.
You can't put a corporation in jail. *very rarely* do corporations get
broken up) and the folks behind the decisions almost never are punished.
> The problem I see with putting restrictions on companies.. is it tends to
> hurt progress and forces them to take dirtyer actions...
I'll wait and see before fearing hurt progress. To my knoweldge, nothign
that the U.S. *can* do to MS will hurt anyone else directly (and MS
already plays as dirty as it can get away with)
> The technology area is probably the area where government intervention
> scares me the most... since they have NO CLUE!
Agreed. But their interventions will most likely be business based, not
technology based.
> > I did tell you I figured out that I could stomach a lassie faire free
> > enterprise system if the government got completely out and no longer
> > allowed business owners to hide behind their 'corporations', right :)
>
> ummm please explain... (feel free to use email if this is too off topic)
A fair chunk of the pro-MS clan (and libertarians/objectivists/et al in
general, which is not to say the whole of the pro-MS clan is l/o/etc al or
vice versa, just that there is some overlap and this one attituide in
common) believe that government should stay out of business and let
corporations go their own way, but seem to forget that the whole
coporation idea is a legal one. Coporations are not a 'natural' concept,
but are created by government.
blah. I'm keeping this out because that's about the extent of my thoughts
on it. I've been lurking around some social darwinistic dicussions this
week and the whole set of attitudes is so illogical it bugs.
bleh.
Vinnie
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