At age 75 (turning another ‘leaf’ in 34 days), I’ve come up against a question/problem: Every idea I’ve come up with in the way of ‘leveling the playing field’ or ‘more evenly distributing the wealth of our society’ has given me a list of reasons to ‘do/enact/require/prohibit’ certain behaviors or actions, I’ve come up with a simultaneous reasons to ‘not do/eliminate/prohibit/require that behavior or action. That’s pretty much all on the ‘natural-person’ level. On the other hand, when it comes to ‘corporate’ ‘persons,’ I find all kinds of things that they are doing, and doing enthusiastically, that are actually contrary to the actual intent of the ‘corporation’ or the people involved in it — whatever the ‘corporation’ may be.
The idea of ‘incorporation,’ the enabling of groups of (natural) people (conceived, born, nurtured, and enabled by natural processes [not requiring direct and immediate human intervention]) to join together to perform certain defined tasks and to achieve certain defined goals unattainable by individual natural persons, dates from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in England, and rapidly spread to the less-rigidly-controlled societies of Europe then to the rest of the world.
England, and to a slightly lesser extent Europe, readily understood this concept, especially in the face of certain excessively powerful individuals’ proclivity towards holding all subordinates in absolute servitude, not allowed to do or say anything that did not. immediately, publicly, and vigorously, support the ‘primacy’ of the individual ruler. This concept allowed England to rapidly develop two separate transportation systems, both superbly engineered, and both highly dependent on the ‘authority’ of the ‘entitled’ head of the social structure to displace less-’powerful’ individuals from their (ancestral) place in society to enable construction and operation of the infrastructure of the canal system and of the railroads.
The idea of ‘corporations’ also took hold in the northern portion of the ‘New World’ (now Canada and the United States), where there was less entrenched ‘aristocracy’ to interfere and ‘demand rights’.
It seems that the farther from England the process and idea took hold, the less understanding there was of the fundamentals of ‘corporation,’ and in many parts of the world “corporations’ became the new aristocracy, displacing older political/social structures that had become far more intent on maintaining their ‘authority’ and ‘power’ rather than fulfilling the original purpose of the organization.
It is becoming more and more apparent that we in the United States must find effective ways to limit the ‘reach’ of large accumulations of wealth, whether by ‘family condensation’ or by ‘corporate growth.’ I’ve heard of hundreds of ideas on this subject, from limiting the number of ‘shares’ the corporation may issue, to limiting the percentage of ownership of the corporation by any single natural person.
I’d like to see more, but each ‘positive’ “we have to require that ..” the person submitting the idea present his or her understanding of what ‘else’ the new requirement would do, and what the ‘unintended consequences’ of the new requirement — or prohibition — might do. And there are ALWAYS “unintended consequences.” (Electing Trump to the Presidency has/had the unintended consequence of displaying just how wildly incompetent a ‘non-government’ person can be, and what sort of consequent disasters can derive from each “oops.’