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5 comments

1 nines09  Mon, Feb 10, 2014 10:32:34am

Criminal.

2 BusyMonster  Mon, Feb 10, 2014 11:36:47am

I’d like to know if we can enshrine in law, a principle that if your corporation just caused BILLIONS of dollars in damage (such as a gigantic plant explosion or oil spill), that instead of being able to squirrel your money away under the guise of bankruptcy, that instead your corporations assets are immediately frozen until culpability can be assigned, and the cost can be FULLY extracted from the corporations coffers before they can sell it off and start over somewhere else.

I also think this should be a huge, expensive, embarrassing pain in the ass to shareholders. I’ve said this before many times. we will not fix capitalism until we tie responsibility to the shareholders too, so that it BURNS when the company they support does something ILLEGAL AND STUPID.

Of course, fixing capitalism isn’t all that big a concern to me. I don’t think it is fixable.

3 EPR-radar  Mon, Feb 10, 2014 6:16:51pm

re: #2 BusyMonster

I’d like to know if we can enshrine in law, a principle that if your corporation just caused BILLIONS of dollars in damage (such as a gigantic plant explosion or oil spill), that instead of being able to squirrel your money away under the guise of bankruptcy, that instead your corporations assets are immediately frozen until culpability can be assigned, and the cost can be FULLY extracted from the corporations coffers before they can sell it off and start over somewhere else.

I also think this should be a huge, expensive, embarrassing pain in the ass to shareholders. I’ve said this before many times. we will not fix capitalism until we tie responsibility to the shareholders too, so that it BURNS when the company they support does something ILLEGAL AND STUPID.

Of course, fixing capitalism isn’t all that big a concern to me. I don’t think it is fixable.

Making shareholders liable most certainly would end capitalism.

For now, my wish list is more modest —- making officers of the company personally liable in cases of criminal corporate wrongdoing would be a good start.

4 calochortus  Mon, Feb 10, 2014 7:49:46pm

re: #3 EPR-radar

Making shareholders liable most certainly would end capitalism.

Yup, especially if the shareholders own those shares as part of a mutual fund, or index fund. That is the whole point of a limited-liability set-up, you can’t expect someone who owns 0.000001% of a company to have any say in how it is run.

5 Chrysicat  Mon, Feb 10, 2014 8:09:49pm

re: #2 BusyMonster

[snip]
Of course, fixing capitalism isn’t all that big a concern to me. I don’t think it is fixable.

Oh, it’s quite fixable. The first duty is to ensrhine in law a principle that a corporation may, or preferably even should, place its long-term profitablilty/survival as a higher priority than the next quarter’s earnings report, which by itself would prevent the corporate raids that are being made on those companies that had been working sustainably in the absense of rules specifically permitting that.

The second is probably really part of the first—a law codifying that responsibility to shareholders is permitted to be considered to cover things like, y’know, NOT shitting where you eat and actually preserving the environment…which a particularly noisy group of vulture capitalists keep saying is a violation of fiduciary duty.

Abolishing corporate personhood vis-a-vis the First Amendment is probably a good idea too. As long as money continues to equal speech, corps will be able to speak louder than individual humans, and volume has a value all its own in that arena.

And we need to get past the idea of ‘too big to fail’ and break up conglomerates that are creating even oligopolies—let alone natural monopolies—so that competition returns to benefit the customer.

But moving to communism instead isn’t a good alternative. You can’t have a working economy based on telling the people what they’ll have, and socialism and communism are even more based on telling the people what they’re allowed to do than modern crapitalism is. It’s a great way to provide services the community needs but that can never be profitable, and those should probably be socialized in almost all instances.
And I might favor government being the provider of natural-monopoly services either. At the very least, they need to be re-regulated. Where there can’t be competition, the end user will never benefit.

———


Teal Deer? Third-way Socialism. For mail, and anything that needs any sort of linear terrestrial easement like a water or power line, government responsibility. Preferably, also the payer for privately-provided medical care (making physicians government employees rarely works well. Actually, to an extent, making them employees period doesn’t).

Private banks and retailers, as well as wireless-communications companies, actively broken up when they get to the point where oligopoly ensues (though admittedly I’m not the one to determine a minimum number of providers in such a market. Possible re-regulation of commercial transport—ask St. Louis what happened when it became a hub-for-only-one-airline.

Goods providers much less monitored with the exception of drug manufacturers; very few goods are necessary to modern existence, and the ones that are already, normally can’t rent-seek like a service can.


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