09-24-2020, 06:39 PM
(This post was last modified: 09-24-2020, 06:40 PM by freeloader.)
Serious question: how does one reconcile deregulation and reliance on the genius of the free market (which is really predicated on the idea of perfectly knowledgeable market participants) with government support for corporations? The corporation, as a matter of law and policy, is a person created by the state. It is a fictive legal person vested with vast powers, including immortality and the ability to earn money while paying a significantly lower amount of taxes than a biological person. As a practical matter, the function of the corporation is to achieve things (like economies of scale, monopoly, and the ability to compel action on the part of consumers like mandating arbitration) that a biological person is incapable of doing. The corporation, in other words, exists for the sole purpose of disrupting, not supporting, the free market. What, for instance, is limited liability, but a means of co-opting the normal recourse that a biological person has to bring suit against another biological person? How, then, does one support both “unregulated” free markets and corporations? To my mind, that is like saying you advocate for the harmonious mixing of vinegar and oil. Sure, tastes good on a salad (works as an abstraction disarticulated from reality), but it doesn’t actually work in the real world.