>And they do. Corporate personhood is just a legal fiction to enable that.
Bull. Normal people don't get legal fictions like "limited liability", they aren't legally required to overrule their conscience in the service of shareholders either.
>Get another job, if you don't like the current one. No reason to starve. I find it interesting how you advocate destroying a lot of the legal protections that job creating corporations need in order to function, and then turn around and complain indirectly that it's not convenient enough to find jobs. Well, I suppose it might be a good idea in that light to stop trying to kill the golden goose.
I did nothing of the kind - I called ALL capitalist employment nothing but slavery. If the only freedom we have gained (for the vast majority of people) is the right to choose a different owner, then we have gained no freedom at all.
More-over I don't believe that any of these legal fictions are required for businesses to operate - for a start, they are actually very recent inventions and busineses operated quite well and profitably for centuries before they were there. In fact the corporation as we know it didn't exist until the early 20th century - until then the law (in the USA) stated that corporation could never sign more than one customer contract. A corporation was founded to raise capital for one specific project and one project alone. Upon conclusion of said project it was automatically disbanded.
Granted some other corporations internationally had previously existed for extended periods - but only because they were engaged in very long projects - one of them had it's own army, and ruled over a third of the surface of the planet. Nobody had the rights of citizens, only the duties of an employee - no recourse, no right to change jobs, yet somehow "not slaves" - even as said corporation happily ran one of the largest slave-trading operations in world history (indeed it supplied the vast majority of the slaves the USA was buying).
Nope, corporations don't lay any golden eggs - what they do is to take the efforts of true entrepeneurs, fire them and turn them into an abberation that considers cost-cutting more important than quality, that lie and steal and cheat their customers to the highest extent they can get away with, flaunt the rule of law and buy political power to do it more - and never, ever face any true justice.
Do you know how many Enron executives have served jailtime ? I know. Zero. Not one. The only one who was even formally charged was CEO Ken Lay and he never stood trial because he died before the trial began. The rest got even more lucrative jobs to perform similar scams for other corporations - what they did at Enron was APPEALING to shareholders (even as it drew the hated ire of everybody else).
You know that's not the ugliest of it ? Those Enron executives paid themselves a massive set of massive bonus cheques, out of borrowed money one day... the next day they fired over 1400 workers and announced the bankruptcy of the company - secure in the knowledge that the debt would not have to be repaid thanks to bankruptcy laws and that limited liability would let them keep their bonuses. That right there - is the single largest cash robbery in human history.
Golden eggs my ass. Rent-seeking parasites more-like. And what other corporations get up to are, in general, worse. That wasn't as bad as it gets. Not by a long shot.
Shell oil has been convicted of actually hiring assassins to silence their critics in Nigeria - cold-blooded murder, and nobody faced a criminal charge. The company got a fine, but all the executives who signed off on it got away scott free.
There is no economic benefit from corporations - and indeed every single person employed by one would be living a higher quality life if they were instead employed by a private company doing the exact same business.
One of the most admirable businessmen alive today Richard Branson hates corporations perhaps even more than me - because his company, Virgin -used to be one. Virgin went public in 1999, many people hopefully invested, but sadly so did a lot of the usual people who buy shares only so they can force companies to milk their customers, employees and the environment for all their worth with no regard for long term impacts or costs of their actions. Branson didn't hang around long enough to experience what usually happens with entrepreneurs when their companies go public (96% of them get fired from the companies they started within 3 years) - he realized in just six months that he could not live in good consciences with what these shareholders were demanding he turn his business into, with how they demanded he treat his workers, with how they demanded he gouge and defraud his customers - so he bought the shares back - every last one of them, and took the company private again. For that he has my everlasting respect (and conveniently - he is a lot richer now than he was back then, and also still in charge of his company).
That is the kind of entrepeneur who DOES lay the golden eggs. Corporations ? There is nothing they do that a cooperation cannot have done with less harm and no purpose they serve that is actually beneficial to society.