BW Richardson http://bwrmontag.blogspot.com/2006/03/something-to-take-comfort-in-as-we.html praises BB&T for its refusal to lend to developers who benefit from eminent domain. I would like to be in a position to reward companies like BB&T for such socially responsible actions and policies. I long ago concluded that my power as a consumer is much more significant than my power as a voter.
Back before Mrs Vache Folle and I sunk all our money (and then some) into our house, we had almost all our savings in a “socially responsible” mutual fund. The fund declined to invest in blatantly evil companies, like tobacco or arms makers, or companies that did not meet the fund’s criteria for social responsibility. The fund did pretty well, and we got to comfort ourselves that we weren’t hurting anyone through our investments.
On her radio program the other day, Rachel Maddow interviewed a woman who was involved in the development of the “Blue Pages”, a listing of companies whose actions and policies are consistent with “progressive” values. I think this is a great idea, and I would love to see similar compilations or ratings of businesses on the basis of libertarian values. If possible, I don’t want to trade with folks who benefit from eminent domain, who use government to disadvantage competitors, who feed at the government trough, who gain from slave labor, who are complicit in murder or torture, or who violate any number of my deeply held values.
Does such a compilation/rating already exist? If not, what might it take to get one going? I would pay for a subscription to such a service.
On a somewhat related note, Dr Lenny wonders why corporations even exist: http://www.howdt.com/blog/2006/03/corporations-why.html#comments. As a corporate tool, I have observed that the corporate form doesn’t seem to provide much in the way of real benefits to investors. Limited contractual liability could be had in other ways, and as often as not the corporate form carries with it tort liability for the acts and omissions of long departed predecessors. Moreover, the added costs of administration, loss of transparency and bizarre incentives that accompany the corporate form eat up any benefits that one might derive as an investor. It does enable executives to enrich themselves and legions of administrators like me to earn a living doing nothing with any bearing on the bottom line.
I confess that I am not all that clear on the basis of left libertarian objections to the corporate form in principle except for the embiggening that it facilitates.
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4 comments:
Well, there are two objections I have to the corporate form, in principle:
1. It's an artificial construct of the state.
Some sort of voluntary joint-stock contract system wouldn't bother me at all.
Or to put it another way, a corporation that wouldn't exist without being chartered, shouldn't exist.
2. All those things you mentioned about the corporation not being a particularly good form of business for the owners, constitutes prima facie evidence that it shouldn't exist, ceteris paribus. Why don't non-corporate competitors rip them a new one, in every market?
The reason I suspect is because of the way our finance system works, corporations are able to float past obstacles that other companies can't. (and most of these obstacles are also at least partially a creation of the state)
So it's not so much corporations themselves, but all the extraneous interventions and crimes that make corporations artificially viable that I object to.
Thanks Adem for helping to clear this up for me.
it is funny how things work, or don't work, and corporations don't work for a majority of the people. But - the amassment of the capital necessary to start an enterprise really requires some form of mutual association. I have had a single accounting class and a single economics class, but spend enough time picking up garbled austrian economics from a variety of sources to understand a few things. generally accepted accounting practices and transparency are never ever ever found in the same paragraph, non-the-less the same sentence. yet if corporations were modeled after biological systems, where the function of each entity within was completely under the domain of the enterprise in charge with no mission creep, then maybe they would work well. Could you imagine what would happen if your heart started thinking instead of pumping blood?
Adem has some good points. Oh, and of course, there are the churches that are 501(c)(3) non-profit corporations. Imagine that... a church as an artificial construct of the state.
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