At the same time, I think you are ignoring how diverse people really are. There's no consensus to be had when dealing with mutual exclusives, no matter what method is chosen.
Perhaps the solution is to lean further into fractionalization, but in a peaceful and constructive way. That might mean the destruction of democracy, but I think this just points to democracy not being a good inclusive system to begin with.
You can't have perpetual sustainability without perpetual growth.
Also, capitalism doesn't need perpetual growth either (anymore than other system, that is). Independent and worker-owned media are still facets of capitalism, for starters.
Okay. Do you then consider an equilibrium to be inherently unsustainable?
If you take «growth» to be defined as d(something)/dt>0, I’d posit that any equilibrium by definition has zero net growth, whether it’s a static or dynamic equilibrium.
It's a bit reversed, labor unions are cooperatives, not the other way around, as cooperatives are more flexible in arrangement than unions.
Don't disagree with the rest of the comment though.
EDIT: also, I wouldn't consider coops an anarchist victory over traditional private companies anymore than democracy over monarchy. The corporation > worker hierarchy is still there, even with the different share distribution. It's a good demonstration of an alternative and underappreciated corporate structure, tho.
That's still not proof of victimhood. Only that's imprudent to consume drugs.
Also, due to politization of the topic, part of the data is distorted to help sell the war on drugs, which had a much more destructive effect overall, aside from failing in its main goal.
> We don't know how much higher the drug usage would be if all drugs were legalized.
Given what we know about the prohibition era and insights about the success in the fight against drug abuse, it's a pretty safe bet.
> That's an extremely general statement which is almost certainly wrong.
Is it? Even the most successful countries, like Japan and Singapore, seem to have low drug usage despite of criminalization, not because of. Even then, the data is murky, because criminalization of usage incentivizes low self-reporting.
They're not, and the terminology shouldn't be confused. "Juridical people" tries to sneak in priors about what "people" means.
People, of course, have rights. Corporations are not people, including "juridical people". They are legal fiction with absolutely no rights. Every action they take is permission granted to them by the people.
You have it backwards. As you acknowledged elsewhere, "juridical people" is an abstraction over a group of people. To be more precise, a collective acting towards a unified goal (with a set of norms binding them together).
Even the naive perspective over this recognizes that the corporation has "rights" by being proxies of their constituents, so you are correct in saying "Every action they take is permission granted to them by the people."
However, a more careful analysis recognizes that the exercised rights of a corp comes from a combination of the rights of its members, often in intermingled way (due to binding norms of the corp) that doesn't map directly into a singular individual. As such, it's common to abstract it as the "rights of the corporation". You can look at the individual rights (sometimes you have to), but that's like looking at humans by their individual cells. Certainly doable, but cumbersome most of the time.
Also, I find the phrase "They are legal fiction with absolutely no rights" funny. As if rights weren't legal fiction themselves. Not that this means much either, ethics and law are about "what ought to be done", and that's - objectively - as fictional as you can get.
You're confusing them again, which is why sneaking in priors with the term "people" is bad. "granted to them by the people" means "We The People", society, etc, not the people in control of the legal fiction.
> being proxies of their constituents
These proxies have no rights. People can exercise their rights as people. Or, they can create legal fictions with no rights. That legal fiction inherits no rights from the owners, which is where the analogy fails. There's no intermingling/combination/whatever to call "rights", because there's nothing.
Every action that legal fiction takes is a permission granted to it by society that continues to tolerate its existence. That tolerance is finite. When that tolerance ends, so does the legal fiction's existence. Unlike with people, there are no moral quandaries with revoking the privilege of existence.
Rights being inherent to people is an interesting but separate topic. We've generally agreed as a society that people have rights.
> People can exercise their rights as people. Or, they can create legal fictions with no rights.
How exactly do you think they can create these legal fictions? Through their rights. That's how corporations inherit them. Keep in mind I'm not focusing on LLCs, but the more broader concept, that also includes an organized society under a common set of rules.
> There's no intermingling/combination/whatever to call "rights", because there's nothing.
There's clearly something, as "Microsoft" and "Google" are distinct entities. To imply there's nothing is to imply there's no difference.
> Every action that legal fiction takes is a permission granted to it by society that continues to tolerate its existence.
Who is "society" here? Everyone? Clearly not, or else this trial would not have reached this conclusion while others complain in the internet about its results. Generally, it refers to a group of people bound by a set of rules (the constituion, laws, etc.), i.e. a corporation. So it's a bit funny that a legal fiction decides whether other legal fictions exist.
> Rights being inherent to people is an interesting but separate topic.
We are in a discussion about whether corporations have rights or not. It ultimately will touch on the source of rights and where they are derived from.
> We've generally agreed as a society that people have rights.
Which doesn't do much against rights being legal fiction. Or corporations having rights.
I'm also focused on the broader principle, not just specifically any one structure such as LLCs.
I have the legal right as a person to write on a piece of paper "i am a person". That piece of paper does not inherit any rights by my doing so.
Me writing "Microsoft" on one paper and "Google" on another paper certainly means that those two pieces of paper are distinct. Neither one, however, has rights.
What I meant by intermingling/combination/whatever is that, there are no rights to inherit, because a piece of paper has no rights, inherited or otherwise. That includes intermingled rights of people. People may have complex intermingled rights on certain subjects. That is not applicable to legal fictions, because they don't have rights and can't inherit rights.
I think it will become clear as you picture the silly idea of writing "I'm a piece of paper and I have rights" and then expecting that to mean anything. Work backwards from there.
Is the piece of paper a collective of people? Does the piece of paper have agents to enact the decisions of its rulling body? You seem to be forgetting the primary reason why corporations have rights in this perspective.
There's, objectively, an intermingling of rights happening inside an corporation, which derives directly from the "under a normative instrument" part of the definition of a corporation, which creates legal interactions between the rights of the members. That's simply a fact.
And, again, may I remind you, "rights", "laws", "norms", etc. are legal fiction. They don't have an actual corporeal body. Arguably, corporations have more of one given that they have agents, and the actions they do, on behalf of the corporation, is very material.
You're trying to make sense of a broken worldview. Hopefully the absurdity is becoming clear.
No, it's just a piece of paper.
Yes, rights/laws/norms/etc are legal fiction. Harm is material. Without harm, there's not much purpose to a legal system. A bad legal system lets someone harm someone else, and then wave around a piece of paper saying "Oh, it was this piece of paper that did it, not me, I'm not responsible!"
A good legal system recognizes that that's absurd. We currently play along far too much, and Citizens United was a breaking point for many people.
There are conflicts that always produce harm to one of the sides, regardless of legal system (these emerge from mutually exclusive situations). Thus, by your statements, there are only broken legal systems.
Also, mentioning in the "Citizens United v. FEC" case along with "Piercing the corporate veil" concept is a bit funny, because if you pierce the corporate veil of Citizens United in that court case, and look at it as "the shareholders behind Citizens United v. FEC", you will actually strengthen the majority opinion of the Court.
Honestly, I don't think it's me who has a broken world view, but you. I keep two perspectives in regards to corporations: an individualistic one (which backs the "pierce the corporate veil") and a organic one, inspired by system theory and emergent properties, and I try to not mix them without appropriate care. On the other hand, you seem to hold grievances that are only related, but not directly connected, to corporate personhood. In particular, no offense, your perspective about the law seems rather reductive.
The one that backs the law, for instance. But, more broadly, corporations, specially ones ruled by shareholders/contracts, tend to have a will of their own, and "people" in ethics is more about will and desire than biology.
It's a dangerous game to anthropomorphize legal fictions by using terms like attributing "will" to them. Likewise by sneaking in priors with the term "people". It's best to stick to calling them legal fiction.
It might help to picture them as literally a piece of paper. It would be pretty silly to say that piece of paper has a "will of its own" or "rights" or calling it a "person", wouldn't it?
If I scribble "i am a person" on a piece of paper, it's still just a piece of paper. If I get a bunch of people to join in and scribble something on the same piece of paper, it's still just a piece of paper. There's no confusion over "rights" or "will". It's a piece of paper.
The usage of the term "will" isn't unwarranted nor simply an anthropomorphization for the sake of it. Long story short, it's the recognition that both individuals and corps (through their agents, not to be confused by their members) can enter into conflict. A legal conflict can only emerge between entities that have a "will". This isn't something I ascribed onto them, this is something I observed in them given the definitions I'm working with. I suspect our conflict lies in them.
The anthropomorphization simply emerges out of a shared property in this context. Keep in mind I haven't said anything about biology.
I don't buy it at all. For example, it's generally considered to be unethical to kill a person aside from limited circumstances such as self defense. Killing a person because they're no longer useful to you is Right Out in every ethical framework I've ever heard of. Are you implying that dissolving a corporation is unethical?
Depends on each jurisdiction. You'd have to look at which frameworks informed the laws that back each corporation.
On the topic of corporate dissolution, I see less as killing and more as natural death. When a corp dissolves in accordance to its norms and general ethics (or the jurisdiction it's under, at least), that's equivalent to someone naturally dying. The constituents no longer wish to participate and follow the binding rules that define the corp to dissolve it, enacting its "will", if you will (pun intended).
Something akin to murder would be a "hostile take over into a dissolution" situation, where a rogue member decides to unilaterally dissolve the corp in defiance of the other members despite having no legal justification, neither in the binding norms of the corp nor in their personal rights (although that's generally implied, as, in theory, no contract can violate this). I think we can agree that the latter case would indeed be unethical, if not illegal.
Also, killing people strictly because they are not useful to you is covered by a "rule by might" ethics framework. Not one I agree with, but it exists.
Why would it be a natural death when it's destroyed by another person?
Really this comes down to sloppy usage of words. You said the phrase yourself: "juridical people." You need that qualifier on it, "juridical," to distinguish from actual human beings. Because they're not the same. "Corporations are people" -> corporations are legal entities that share some of the same rights, privileges, and responsibilities as human beings. "Corporations aren't people" -> corporations are a distinct concept from human beings, including ethically and legally.
Legally, the argument comes down to how precise you're being. Is there an implied qualifier? Is the statement meant to convey that corporations are legally the same as natural persons (they aren't) or just that they are some sort of legal entity? And the whole dispute here is because people are interpreting it differently.
To rephrase the comment some replies above: "Because corporations aren't natural people."
All the discussion about corporate personhood is off the mark, because corporate personhood only means that corporations have some of the rights that natural persons have, and voting is not generally among them. Although apparently it is in one town in Delaware.
Because the another personin question is one the constituents acting in behalf of the corporation itself. Perhaps it's closer to suicide, but still, it's not just "another person", but, in a sense, a part of the corporation itself.
I think the dispute is more about interpretation. Ultimately, what I've shown is more of a perspective (one I believe it's useful due to the legal interplay of rights that happen inside), but one can just look at corporations by looking at their members, agents and the rules they've agreed prior and I suspect it would be equivalent to treating corporations as real people, presuming jusnaturalism.
Given that voting is a right currently derived from a more juspositivistic perspective, the justifications behind who's considered a "natural person" and who gets to vote are pretty arbitrary.
If you could just look at corporations by looking at their members then there would be no need for a legal fiction, because the law could also just look at the members.
But that's not at all what happens. "Meta, Inc." is not just a shorthand way of naming all the shareholders of Meta, Inc. It is a separate legal entity, owned by but not identical to the shareholders.
Why do people bother making corporations in the first place? It's precisely because they want a legal entity that is not themselves. Typically this is so that, for example, the corporation's liabilities are not legally the owner's liabilities. In other words, you form an LLC so that your customers can't sue and take your house.
Your approach is IMO far too philosophical. Corporations are a totally pragmatic construct. They exist because they provide a structure that we as a society consider to be useful in order to promote commerce, innovation, and all that stuff. Nothing about that structure is set up that way because it logically follows from the rights and duties of the owners. It's set up that way because it's supposed to facilitate commerce.
I agree that corporations aren't just shorthands for their shareholders. That's why I think the qualifiers "towards a unified goal" and "under a binding normative instrument" are important. Specially the latter one.
LLCs, in particular, are just one type of corporation and tend to have a well defined set of laws and agreements backing them, with the primary purpose of limiting liabilities towards the owners. Personally, I'm favor of revising the way these liabilities are limited as to internalize externalities.
That being said, the corporation's liabilities not being, necessarily, the constituents' isn't inspired solely on LLC law, but also organic theory.
But, yeah, my approach is pretty philosophical because it is a "philosophy-first, pragmatism-second" one.
Nothing wrong with being philosophical in general. But not so much when talking about how things actually are in a case where there’s very little philosophy behind the setup.
Which is why elsewhere I make the argument that we should strongly reject the terminology of "people" in any relation to corporations. It leads people down bad mental thought processes by sneaking in priors.
Corporations are not "X people". Corporations are not people, period. Natural people are just people.
I had the same logic as you previously, actually. But, eventually, I realized the terminology is not as misleading as it appears.
Try defining what is "people". What is "natural people". Why do "natural people" have "rights". What is a "corporation". How does a "corporation" differ from any other legal fiction. So on.
People are humans. Natural people are people, and therefore humans. Humans have rights because we all want to live in a society where it's not OK to murder people without consequences.
Corporations are pieces of paper we've scribbled on. Because they are pieces of paper, they cannot be harmed.
This is the primary difference between corporations and people.
People can be harmed through the pieces of paper they've scribbled on. That is material. But do not mistake that for the paper being harmed. It can't be. It's just a piece of paper.
1. Why only humans are people? Why not other species, even if they were as sentient as us?
2. What is murder? Why is killing justified in certain cases (e.g. self defense, death penalties, abortions, etc.) and not in others?
3. What is the piece of paper of a corporation? What makes it different any other piece of paper? I don't think USA's agents are harming people through pieces of papers.
4. What is harm? Consider when someone puts fire into one of Meta's unoccupied buildings who gets harmed.
For starters, Taiwan wasn't invaded nor occupied by the US. South Korea wasn't invaded by the US either, unless you want to say the Soviet Union invaded the North. Even so, that would be, at least, an innacurate description of the events.
Furthermore, the technical definition for "military occupation", according to Hague Convention, S.3 Art.43:
Territory is considered occupied when it is actually placed under the authority of the hostile army.
The occupation extends only to the territory where such authority has been established and can be exercised.
US is not a hostile army nor has established authority over SK's government and/or territory. In fact, US only controls the SK's army during wartime, which is not the case currently. The link you cite says US and SK are meeting together to negotiate the transition of wartime OPCON to SK as well, and US seems willing, even with Trump in power.
For starters, Taiwan is a province of China where US currently sells weapons and has political capture. This would be akin to China placing weapons in Texas and openly supporting separatism there.
Second, the US absolutely did invade Korea. In September 1945, the US Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK) took over the southern half of the peninsula. It ruled for three full years, outlawed local people's committees, and kept using the old Japanese colonial bureaucracy. That is a textbook military occupation. When the Korean War broke out in 1950, the US provided 90 percent of all combat forces and placed the South Korean military under the operational control of an American general. There weren't even any elections under the occupation until the late 80s. It was a literal dictatorship.
That control has never truly gone away. Today, South Korea is under de facto US military occupation. The US runs Camp Humphreys, the largest overseas US base on the planet, with its own postal service and currency. More importantly, the US controlled Combined Forces Command holds wartime operational control over the entire South Korean military. If fighting resumes, Seoul's army does not answer to Seoul, but to a four star American general. And a US dominated UN Command still publicly dictates what South Korea's parliament can legislate near the DMZ.
Taiwan is like Texas, if USA suffered a coup and the original ruling government took residence in Texas. In other words, not like today's Texas. Underpinning your comment is the notion that terrorities that once belonged to a nation should always belong to them forever more. That's textbox imperialism. You are also overselling US influence over Taiwan's politics, specially in regards to separatism. US isn't interested in an actual independent Taiwan, nor unification under the ROC.
In regards to the occupation argument, actual military occupation requires a hostile army, in which US's didn't qualify, even with their outlawing of PCs (which don't serve as actual represention for the Korea's populace, specially in the North, after the Soviets' actual colonialist meddling over them). We can agree that US's attempt to reestablish order was poorly done (by incompetence and/or constraints), but it objectively doesn't fit the criteria for military occupation. We can relax the conventional definition to include US's control, but that would include the USSR over the North.
In the Korean War, while USA may have provided troops, this was done by the ROK's request. In multiple times, USA was more than willing to leave ROK should it ask (or even let them). Even your citation shows this. You also use the phrase "There weren't even any elections under the occupation until the late 80s" as if USA was responsible for this. USAMGIK was already gone, replaced by ROK proper. Also it's wrong. ROK had two de facto republican regimes (five de jure) prior to the current one, but they were plagued by coup. Still, they had elections. And that's only considering presidential elections. Also, none of this, aside from the organization of the first democractic election, involved the US. So it wasn't a singular dictatorship (specially in comparison to NK), much less one US-controlled.
Even the "de facto" current occupation is wrong. Did you mean to say "de jure"? CFC might give a US general control during wartime, but that hasn't been the case since December 1994, and this might change relatively soon, as noted by the article you linked. UNC only has enough legitimate authority to facilitate diplomacy and keep the armistice and, as far as I can tell, US hasn't abused it. Finally, the existence of a military base of a foreign country isn't an indication of de jure occupation, even less so de facto. Only when this foreign country uses it as pressure and that results in visible policy changes it becomes evidence of occupation. Has that happened?
Just one thing: the government is a massive private entity and a middle man. The closest thing to the stated goal would be a contract between other insterested parties to pool resources for funding. The next one would be a local consumer co-op explicitly formed for that specific purpose.
In German law, any contract, including bets, is void if it is “sittenwidrig”. For example, if your wager in a bet is to become one’ slave in case you lose, this bet is void.
I suppose they never specified the wager. But, given the topic is prediction markets and the topics of the bets, I thought it was implied that the wagers would be exclusively in money. With that in mind, is there any example of a law against specific topics being betted on?
Perhaps the solution is to lean further into fractionalization, but in a peaceful and constructive way. That might mean the destruction of democracy, but I think this just points to democracy not being a good inclusive system to begin with.
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