Foolish call to "end corporate personhood"

Los Angeles Poised To Be The First Major U.S. City To Call For End To Corporate Personhood

The notion that somehow “corporate personhood” is the problem and needs to be abolished is abysmally foolish, ignorant, and stupid. It reflects a profound incomprehension of the fundamentals of law that have been painfully evolved over more than 2000 years.

One more time:

A “PERSON” IS A ROLE, NOT THE ACTOR WHO PLAYS THE ROLE.

Repeat that to yourself 1000 times, reflecting on it each time, until it is burned into your consciousness.

Each individual is not one person, but many. In each of many roles we are a legally distinct person, each with its own rights, powers, and duties, and only a role, not the actor, can appear as a party in a court of law. Anything else would destroy the foundations of law of any meaningful kind. Moreover, it would be a denial of our right to associate to impede us from acting with one another in concert as a single person. That would be tyranny. And people acting in concert is the essence of what a “corporation” is. It means, literally, a “co-operation”.

The problem, as complex as it is, is basically the same general problem we have always had: Excessive and unbalanced concentrations of power. That has two main components:

1. Organizations that are too large, and emergent behaviors that function like organizations even if they are not formally organized.
2. Imposition of fiat currency on all of us by statutes that make legal tender of something other than gold, silver, energy, or other physical assets, abetted by us acquiescing in that imposition.

Yes, concentration of excessive power in large corporations is a problem, but that has nothing to do with them being corporations. It would be the same problem if they were sole proprietors or just herds of players all playing the same strategy at the same time. It has largely been that herd behavior that has prevented shareholders of large organizations from reining in their managers and their foolish and dangerous practices. Greed can be good if many players each play a different strategy. When they all make the same moves together the result is disaster. It makes no difference how or whether they are formally organized, because the results are the same.

Thoreau and Gandhi had specific, well-defined objectives. For Thoreau it was to end the war with Mexico. For Gandhi it was to end British rule of India. What do the Occupiers seek? They seem to neither know or care to make the effort to learn.

They are like a dumb animal in distress who utters inarticulate cries of distress. But how can anyone respond to that? A physician might ask an articulate patient questions, or conduct tests, to try to make a diagnosis. But the physician is out, and even if he were in, he doesn’t have a clue what to do, because he is part of the malady.

Make no mistake. We are all stupid here. We confront a challenge that requires almost all of us to be vastly more intelligent and knowledgeable than human beings can ever hope to be individually. The only chance we have is to become more intelligent and knowledgeable collectively, but the only institutional framework that might enable that to happen has been largely abandoned: the framework set forth by the Constitution of 1787-91, as originally understood. Either we return to strict compliance with it, and other nations do likewise, or we will descend into a new Dark Age from which civilization may never again emerge.

Read more at Constitution