[maiar]

This. The entire point of corporations is to shield individuals from penalties, but they don’t work. Business failure in good faith, where the shielding makes sense, is not really protected because bank loans require personal liability and because it’s impossible these days to recover from a damaged reputation unless you come from a family rich enough to hire its own PR firm. On the other hand, when it comes to letting rich people get away with absolutely unambiguous criminality, corporations work very well.

[ryandrake]

The corporate veil should provide enough protection from random and unforeseeable failures to encourage entrepreneurship, but not enough that it shields wrongdoers from consequences. Currently it shields nearly everyone from everything in nearly all cases from run-of-the-mill business failure all the way up to straight-up fraud.

[maiar]

It doesn’t shield small business owners in practice, though. Bank loans tend to require personal liability, and there are ways to pierce the corporate veil when the company is provably one person. So individuals get only a small amount of protection in practice. Even if you fail in good faith, there’s a good chance that your life and reputation are ruined.

On the other hand, large companies are basically private armies in which the presumably passive shareholders are so distant from the actions taken on their benefit that people almost never go to jail unless they are deliberately thrown to the wolves by shareholders or superiors.

[gruez]

>Currently it shields nearly everyone from everything in nearly all cases from run-of-the-mill business failure all the way up to straight-up fraud.

Tell that to Bill Hwang or Sam Bankman-Fried.

[alt227]

I get the feeling this was the plan from begining.

[lesuorac]

Sure, the plan (of LLCs) was always to limit liability but initially _who_ could incorporate wasn't literally everybody.

Like the founding fathers ran their business as themselves. There isn't some Monticello LLC that Thomas Jefferson was CEO of so if TJ did something bad then he's personally liable for it. This is what's changed and is the problem, people get LLCs in situations they really don't deserve them in.

[brookst]

While the lack of accountability for corporations is crazy, I’m a firm believer in the Cube observation: there is no master plan.

[contingencies]

IIRC the modern corporation as a legal entity was created in response to the high capital and high risk requirements embodied in early western shipping ventures. The first stock exchange ("bourse") for this was actually French(?) (hazy here, possibly Belgian or Dutch, and probably roots in Hanseatic League financing if not beyond). FWIW there's a whole subset of the antiques world which deals in share notes - promissory notes issued to people funding capital intensive ventures like new railway lines, often beautifully decorated and serial numbered for nominal security against forgery.

AFAIK the follow-on concern of manipulation of the modern legal environment as a tool for unencumbered multinational greed really began with entities like the East India Company being empowered by pontificating rulers back home granting because-I-said-so immunity for arbitrary actions outside their borders, thus establishing the ground work for industrial scale opium trading, piracy, slavery, and banana republics. We're in a period of relative reckoning now where the cash-piles thus accrued are facing some popular scrutiny, but there'll never be recompense. As we've reached the ends of the earth and new wealth to seize has become scarce, we've turned to speculation and beyond earth to mars, the metaverse, and media in general. Stock markets are largely society's greed temples and in some cases designed for money laundering (eg. Singapore stock market for the Burmese junta). Even small companies on the public markets are worth orders of magnitude more than you can earn in a lifetime, leading to an intellectual drain toward speculative systemic value extraction instead of productive ventures.

IMHO a naive hope of crypto was a reckoning, instead we received the opposite: increased speculation, libertarian multinational economics and now abject political profiteering. No action on critical issues like climate. Less international trust and diplomatic potential than we've had since WWII - truly, we are lost. But it's less a conspiracy than a back-scratching piggy trough of reverent greed-inertia, in which all pigs are created equal but a cabal of investment bankers are more equal than others. Meanwhile everyone else slave for their locally dangled currency carrot, backed primarily by golden handcuffs of mortgages, an inertia of ignorance, a charade of democratic process, increasing global population dependence on multinational trade to meet quality of life expectations, and conveniently captured choke points like identity (The End of the Nation State: The Rise of Regional Economies), food (Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System), regulation (Preventing Regulatory Capture: Special Interest Influence and How to Limit It), international logistics (The Outlaw Ocean, International Shipping Cartels), energy (Energy Revolutions: Profiteering versus Democracy), education (Privatizing the Public University), media (Selective Control: The Political Economy of Censorship) and weaponized finance (Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, Mortgaged Democracy).

It is perhaps not overly hyperbolic to state that the challenge of our era is to determine a mode of capturing the power of emergent technology to undo this situation, and nothing less than the fate of the planet rests on doing so.

[miohtama]

Corporations are owned by people. Profit is distributed back to the society thru dividends. The largest shareholder category is pension funds, not billionaires. So effectively boomers are robbing younger generations.

[whatevaa]

Most profits are distributed by capital (like share price) increases rather than dividends.

[BriggyDwiggs42]

What kind of evidence would you need to see to no longer view corporations in this light?

[PhasmaFelis]

Blaming all your problems on old people isn't any more attractive than blaming them on Jews/women/queers/etc.

You're reading this on a device made in an underpaid Asian sweatshop, wearing clothes that are the same. Old people with pension funds are no more or less complicit in the brutality of the system than you are. Try blaming the people who are causing this situation on purpose, not the millions who are just trying to navigate it as best they can.

[eesmith]

I hate that ever since I was a teen in the 80's I've been encouraged by government policy to put my retirement into pension funds which invest in the stock market, thus justifying all manner of immoral and unethical business practices in the name of protecting pensioner savings.

I am complicit in a rigged system with no escape.