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Guest Post: Why Corporations Matter, Part 1
Submitted by Gonzalo Lira
Why Corporations Matter, Part I
The Antikythera clockwork was a mechanical device, made of bronze and iron gears, that was manufactured by the ancient Greeks in the second century B.C. It was lost in a shipwreck around 150 B.C., and recovered from the bottom of the Mediterranean in 1900. But it was only in the last couple of decades, with the help of sophisticated imaging equipment, that scientists have realized what the rusted hunk of metal actually is:
The Antikythera clockwork is a computer. And a very sophisticated and exact one at that.
It was used to predict eclipses and other astronomical events. Because of its complexity and design sophistication, it probably wasn’t a one-off: The Antikythera clockwork was likely the culmination of at least a few decades’ worth of development by the ancient Greeks—which means that whoever made the Antikythera clockwork had the knowledge to make other, exceedingly useful devices, including clocks and calculators, with a myriad of practical applications.
Nevertheless, the technology that made the Antikythera clockwork possible was lost—it was only in the XIII century that mechanical clockworks were developed in Europe once again. Something to compare to the Antikythera clockwork in complexity, sophistication, compactness and accuracy did not come to be until roughly the XVI or XVII century, depending on your metrics—1,700 years after the ship carrying the Antikythera clockwork went down.
Why was the technology lost?
Actually, that’s the wrong question: Vital bits of knowledge and technology have been getting lost all the time, ever since human beings figured out how to make their own food.
The real question is, Why has technology been preserved and accumulated so effectively over the last four centuries of our current civilization? Why now, and not before?
Think about it: Human beings developed agriculture roughly 10,000 years ago, which created the possibility of settlements and therefore a civilization. Yet every civilization has risen, plateaued, and then fallen, and ultimately their technology and culture have been for the most part lost. Even exceedingly practical bits of knowledge have disappeared, not to mention great art and literature.
The Antikythera clockwork is just one of countless examples, large and small, of lost technology and culture. The development—and just as importantly the maintenance—of technology and culture have been literally Sisyphean tasks. Ziggurats were built in Mesopotamia some 7,000 years ago—then all that knowledge that went into their construction was lost. A thousand years later, ancient Egyptian engineers had to start from scratch when they decided to build their pyramids—then their insights and expertise were lost too, by the time the French got around to building that canker sore in front of the Louvre.
The fact that technology and culture have been constantly lost hasn’t meant that there haven’t been efforts to preserve them. On the contrary, there have been constant efforts. Libraries have been built to preserve art and literature—but then they burned. Guilds have been created to protect crafts and sciences—but then they fell apart.
In fact, when you look at it from this perspective of knowledge preservation, since A.D. 387, the Catholic Church is the only institution which has systematically preserved knowledge across borders and time—but that preservation was of necessity piecemeal; static; and excluded any bit of technology, culture or knowledge that contradicted the Church’s teachings. That’s why, for instance, so many of the racier plays of Sophocles were lost.
That’s also why pure science didn’t progress very much, between A.D. 387 and A.D. 1602. Apart from technology related to warfare, trade and other practical affairs, the Church was a stopper on pure scientific development. Just ask Galileo.
Nevertheless, our current civilization owes a tremendous debt to the Catholic Church. Were it not for the Church, after the fall of Rome, Europe would have descended even further into barbarism than it did. Without the Church, nothing of the Greek and Roman civilisations would have been preserved. But the Church’s cosmopolitanism, coupled with its monasticism, created an archipelago of knowledge across a uniformly ignorant Europe between A.D. 387 (the Gauls’ sacking of Rome) and A.D. 1317 (the likely publication date of Dante’s Inferno), when the Renaissance began.
However, it’s with the Enlightenment starting in 1602 that, suddenly, we have had a geometric progression of technological development: Technology building on technology slowly at first, but then accelerating in a smooth, uninterrupted curve. Indeed, the very idea of “progress”, so reflexively familiar to us today, so never-ending in our imagination, didn’t even exist until the Enlightenment.
This notion of open-ended, never-ending progress has only been possible because there has not been significant loss of technology since the start of the Enlightenment.
People might object and say that technology was lost before the Enlightenment because there was war, disease and famine—but there’s been plenty of war, disease and famine since the start of the Enlightenment. Yet we’ve somehow managed to hang on to our progress.
The question is, Why? Why has there not been a substantial loss of technology and culture over the last 400 years? It’s happened in every other period of history, in every other culture in history—except in Europe, starting about 400 years ago, and spreading out of Europe to eventually encompass the world.
Why?
I’ve been bitching about corporations as of late—I’ve been bemoaning the current era of corporate anarchy and “street-gang corporatism” that seems to have enveloped our society. I’ve been openly wondering whether the United States is descending into a fascist police-state ruled by corporate interests.
But that doesn’t mean I think corporations are the root of all evil. Quite the contrary:
I posit that the invention of the corporation made the progress of our civilization—and the explosion of humanity’s numbers—possible. I would argue that without corporations, the Enlightenment would not have happened, and the civilization we currently enjoy would not have come into existence. I would further argue that, without the concept and practice of the corporation, today we would be living the bad bits of the Middle Ages.
(And you thought I was a tree-hugging, Birkenstock-wearing foo-foo Alterna-geek loser who ends every statement with an interrogative: “It’s 50 degrees Celsius in the shade? So I think it’s hot? But I’m not really sure? It’s just my opinion?”)
Though I think the idea of the corporation was a necessary condition for the development of our civilization, it wasn’t a sufficient condition. In other epochs and cultures, versions of what we could consider corporations have existed—but those civilizations weren’t able to parlay their versions of corporation into what Europeans and the West did: Corporations as a knowledge and technology preserver and aggregator.
Before continuing, let me define what I mean by “corporation”:
I am not referring to mere “companies”—that is, partnerships or syndicates of merchants or adventurers who band together to pursue a common enterprise, an enterprise which they lack the means to pursue individually. Partnerships have existed since forever, syndicates since the Roman times (if not earlier). Chartered companies began roughly in the mid-XVI C. in England and Holland, though of course there were random examples in isolated spots in the centuries before that.
But corporations began in 1602, with the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or VOC; literally “United East India Company”). The VOC was established in 1602, as a competitor to the British East India Company, which had been chartered in 1600. Both companies were spice trading syndicates which had received government monopolies to trade in the Far East.
The Dutch East India Company, however, is the first true corporation because of two key difference from its British counterpart: One, the VOC was the first limited-liability corporation; that is, its financial exposure was limited to the capital contributed to the company, and no more. And two, the VOC was the first company where the participanten (non-managing partners) could sell their participation in the company by way of their anonymous stock. The Amsterdam stock exchange—the first and oldest in the world—was founded specifically so as to trade in those VOC stock.
VOC’s organisational model became the template for all future corporations—and to my way of thinking, this development was the starting date of the Enlightenment, and a turning point in world history.
(Parenthetically, when I speak of “corporations”, I am not referring to giant multi-nationals exclusively, or even implicitly. I’m simply referring to any company whose owners have a limited liability, and whose stock can be traded. In my own mind, I’m imagining a small glass factory which employs about a hundred people, whose penny-stock is publicly traded. Furthermore, when I speak of “company”, I’m referring to any organization of more than one individual, coming together in pursuit of a business or other venture; by this definition, a corporation, a syndicate and a partnership are each a different type of company.)
Cynics view corporations as money-making machines. But that’s just stupid. Corporations—of whatever size—should be viewed as two things: One, productivity engines, designed to produce a specific good or service, while disregarding anything and everything else, so as to satisfy a demand in the society. And two, as repositories of assets, both tangible and intangible.
It’s the second issue which interests me right now: Corporations as repositories of assets.
Before the VOC, commercial enterprises depended on particular people—the cobbler’s business depended on the cobbler himself, and his actual work, and the work of the apprentice cobblers he might have working for him. A partnership depended on specific people working together for a common goal. If one of those people left or died, the partnership was dissolved, or at least had to be severely restructured.
It was quite normal, before the VOC and corporations, for a business to rise, plateau, then decline, and then ultimately vanish—along with all of the business’s accumulated expertise. That is, presumably, what happened to the makers of the Antikythera clockwork. Ambitious men have been forever trying to get their sons to follow the family business they spent so much time, effort and tears nurturing and growing—only to have their hopes dashed when their sons turned out to be uninterested, or even worse, incompetent.
But starting with the Dutch East India Company’s stock, people could take an active interest in a company for a limited time, before passing on the ownership of the corporation to someone else by way of the sale of stock.
Who would take over the corporate entity? Obvious: Someone who was interested in building it up.
People are not single-minded. People like to talk, hang out, fuck, laugh, play, read a book, etc. But corporations are productivity engines. They are supposed to do one thing: Carry out the business of the corporation.
When people are interested in the business of a corporation, they participate in it via stock ownership. The corporation’s interests and the stock owner’s interests align, and both benefit. When the stock owner’s interest flags for whatever reason, they can sell off their ownership in the corporation to someone else.
Thus the corporation and the owners are meeting each other at the moment when they are of most use to one another. And when the owner leaves the business (ie., sells his stock shares), it’s not just that the owner is “cashing out” when he’s no longer interested in the business: It’s that the corporation is continuing on with a new and interested owner, who will use his best efforts to maximise the business of the corporation.
The benefit of the stock sale is not only to the stockholder, but also to the corporation. Because the corporation is leaving behind an uninterested owner, and continuing on with a new stockholder—a new owner—catching this individual at the peak of his interest in the business of the corporation.
A good way to think of this is, the founder of a corporation is like a man who builds a cart, out of scrap metal and wooden planks. He pulls the cart forward, loading it up with whatever he finds along the way, constantly improving his cart, until he reaches a point where he is either too old or too exhausted or simply too uninterested to continue pulling the cart—so he sells it to someone else.
This new owner also improves the cart—she puts new wheels on it, maybe she installs an engine so she can drive it instead of pull it, and so on. Maybe she comes up with ideas to improve the cart that the previous owner could never have imagined—say she replaces the wheels with rockets, and attaches wings to the cart. But then finally, she too is no longer interested in riding the cart—so she sells it on to someone else.
The successive owners have benefitted from the cart—they’ve sold it at a profit to each new owner. But then, the cart itself has also benefited from each sale. Every new owner has improved the cart in some way or another. And human ingenuity being what it is, these improvements have often been in radically unexpected ways. Since the cart—the corporation—is in a practical sense immortal, in theory it can be improved upon infinitely, as it is passed along from owner to owner.
Unlike a pre-modern partnership or any other sort of company lacking in a simple ownership transfer mechanism, a corporation is never dissolved or wound down when an owner decides to exit the property: Rather, the corporation is merely passed from owner to owner by way of its stock sale.
Some owners might decide to break off productive units of a corporation and sell them off—maybe the corporation is a conglomerate, and the new owners decide to break it apart until there’s nothing left. The conglomerate itself might disappear completely—but those productive units that made it up live on with new owners. Gulf + Western would be an example.
A corporation might even go bankrupt—in fact many small corporations do. But if the corporation is of a size where its productive units are individually viable—say one of its factories that produces doo-dads is still a money-making venture—then the corporation’s owners’ stock will be wiped out in a bankruptcy, but the corporation’s productive units will be sold off to pay its creditors. Those productive units will continue to exist through time, with new owners who will improve them.
So then what are these “productive units” that I’m speaking of? The productive units are what carry out the business of the corporation—but that’s no help at all. Let me rephrase the question: What does a productive unit have that makes it worth keeping, as opposed to dismantling it into its component parts—tools, trucks, desks, chairs, etc.—in a bankruptcy? To rephrase again: What is the thing that holds all the assets of a company together, and makes it worth more whole than dissolved?
Or to rephrase yet again: What is the soul of a company?
An apocryphal story: Sir Walter Raleigh bet Queen Elizabeth that he could measure the weight of smoke from a cigar—a seemingly impossible feat. He took a fresh cigar, carefully weighed it, then smoked it, making sure to tap all his ash on the scale. When the cigar was consumed, he weighed the ash and the remains of the cigar—the difference between that weight and the weight of the fresh cigar was, he claimed, the weight of smoke. He was right, too. Just because you can’t catch it, doesn’t mean it’s weightless, or immaterial, or nonexistent.
I said before that a company is a repository of assets, both tangible and intangible. The concept of tangible assets is pretty obvious and straightforward. The company accumulates and owns buildings, trucks, chairs, desks, tools, paperclips, whathaveyou. Those things are the tangible assets of any company.
The intangible assets, however, are trickier. On the one hand, there are monetizable intangible assets, such as patents and copyrights, or specific permits or warrants, and of course professional services. There are also stocks and bonds and other financial assets. These are all intangible assets which can be bought or sold or hired; hence they are monetizable.
But then there is another intangible asset which cannot be quantified or monetized, yet which undoubtably exists, and has real value—like Raleigh’s smoke. This non-monetizable, intangible asset is accumulated through the ordinary activities of the company, and is essential to the company’s existence through time. It is the way in which the component elements of a company are arranged between one another—the way in which tangible and intangible assets are arranged and interact. This seemingly weightless smoke—which is essential—I will call the structural asset of the company.
The structural asset of the company refers to the way that the company is internally organized, in order to pursue its business and satisfy the demand by society for its products. It is the thing that makes a company worth more than the sum of all its tangible and intangible assets.
To make this concept clear: A human body is made up of 43 kg of oxygen, 16 kg of carbon, 7 kg of hydrogen, 2.8 kg of nitrogen, 1 kg of calcium, 780 g of phosphorus, and about a kilo of various other elements. If I gather these elements together, and then dump them all in a tub, do I wind up with a 70 kg person? I should, shouldn’t I? After all, those elements I just mentioned are what make up a human being’s body, in those amounts that I just listed. If I gather them in a tub, and mix them up, a fully formed person ought to pop out, shake my hand, and join me for lunch at the restaurant down the street—right?
Of course not—what’s lacking here is the structure of the body: The way those elements are arranged internally. I can have all the elements that make up a human body—but not have a human body.
Similarly with a company: The machine tools, the trucks, the patents, the services of various workers, the copyrights, the paperclips—those are the component elements that make up a company. But they are not the company. What they need is the structural asset of the company, to arrange those component elements into a viable business.
It cannot be monetized or measured, and it cannot be transferred—it is inherent to the company. The structural asset of a company is constantly being accumulated and expanded through the business activity of the company. It is the thing whose decay leads to the entropy of the company. It is the thing which makes the company worth more than its constituent assets.
The structural asset of a company makes it possible to replace one tangible or intangible asset for another, without losing the company’s identity. That is, it allows a company to swap an old machine on the factory floor for a new one, a new worker for a worker who has left, and still remain what it was. Just as, say, a lung transplant for John does not mean that John ceases to be John and is now Frank, the structural asset allows a company to change machinery and people and locations and even businesses, while maintaining its identity through time.
The structural asset of a company is the mechanism that allows it to accumulate knowledge.
But up until 1602, companies whose owners died or lost interest were dissolved or wound down—thus was the structural asset of a company lost. Which meant that the accumulated knowledge was lost too. That’s why the technology behind the Antikythera clockwork was lost for 1700 years—since there was no mechanism to pass on the accumulated knowledge inherent in the structural asset of their company, once the owners lost interest in the business or died, all the accumulated technologies they had developed were lost.
However, I argue that with the founding of the Dutch East India Company in 1602, such loss of technology stopped happening. Owners who lost interest in the business for whatever reason could sell their stock in the corporation—and thus the corporation lived on, continuing to preserve and accumulate knowledge through time with other, more interested owners. Thus was technological development out of Europe a geometric progression.
This also explains why other cultures and empires, more civilized and advanced than Europe in 1602, were left in the dust a mere two hundred years later, and have been struggling to catch up to the West ever since. Think Japan, China, and the Ottoman Empire in 1602: Far superior to Europe, one and all. Now think Japan, China, the Ottoman Empire in 1850: Far behind Europe technologically, struggling to compete, and only able to once they had imported the concept of the corporation.
Had the Greek manufacturer of the Antikythera clockwork been a corporation instead of (likely) a tradesman with a few apprentices, the technology of the Antikythera clockwork would not have been lost. In fact, that technology would have been built upon as subsequent owners of the Antikythera Clockworks Corporation would have added and expanded its business, before selling on their stock in the corporation to some other owners, who would themselves have improved the corporation.
That did not happen—because corporations did not exist. There was no efficient ownership transfer mechanism which would maximise the benefit for both the seller of the company, and for the company itself. But once corporations came into existence in 1602 in Europe, we have had the smooth uninterrupted material progress I spoke of earlier, and which we enjoy today.
This is why corporations matter. This is why they are an essential part of our current civilization—above any religion, second only to the individual and the state.
In fact, the relationship between that triumvirate is the main issue in our current society—how corporations, individuals and the state can and should interact.
But that’s for another post.
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The only lost technology I wish the world would rediscover is the McRib sandwich.
Or that holiest of objects...the swiffer.
actually the real lost tech was the McDLT where they kept the hot side hot and the cool side cool... total lost art..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTSdUOC8Kac
They could come out with McShit-on-a-Stik and probably sell 2 billion of them.
Implying that the legal entity called a corporation would have allowed us to travel to the stars any faster. I think you are confusing corporation with the word "diety". It reads like a bad Richard Morgan novel (which are fun).
What is a Corporation?
The Corporation (2003)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pin8fbdGV9Y
Exactly. What a strange piece. Reading it (what I could) left me feeling queasy.
And now I know why. Because I do not consider where we have reached progress and in my mind, technology, especially what we have saved of it, has been, as a species, greatly to our detriment, not otherwise as the author suggests.
In fact, the industrial revolution (Enlightenment, that is too funny, to call it that)is the bane of what the dysfunction we are living today.
For two different perspectives (both mine)...
http://aadivaahan.wordpress.com/2010/06/28/the-age-of-machines/
and
http://aadivaahan.wordpress.com/2010/06/10/in-dust-realization/
ORI
htttp://aadivaahan.wordpress.com
The irony. :)
You use a PC (a product impossible without the industrial revolution) to write about how you don't like the industrial revolution, and how man's capacity to form scalable enterprises and retain knowledge makes you "queesy".
This is what passes for "enlightenment" today: to sneer at what makes modern life possible, without of course actually giving up the benefits of modern life.
IMHO, the corporation is nothing more than a robot. Useful? Sure. A repository for knowledge and technique? Sure. Still, it is the creature of human action and that action often requires more introspection than the author wishes to provide.
There are positive aspects to all human inventions, this doesn't excuse us from the responsibility to weigh the costs versus the benefits.
Lastly, Raleigh was wrong. He failed to recognize the weight of tar and other products that were consumed by the body in the process of smoking. This is typical of all human knowledge- we play fast and loose with concepts because we think we understand them. We rarely admit that all knowledge is transient and dependent on the next better understanding of the universe.
This is why economics outside of praxeology doesn't work. Why mathematics fails at perfection- it assumes rational models and the universe isn't rational- it's chaos.
Nice thought provoking piece. Thanks!
Did Raleigh actually smoke the cigar…or just let it burn in an ashtray? If the latter, he would have been right.
+10
Had Oh regional Indian used smoke signals to express his queasiness over man's progress then perhaps he'd have a point.
This is what passes for "enlightenment" today: to sneer at what makes modern life possible, without of course actually giving up the benefits of modern life.
Not many nails have been hit so squarely on the head. Bravo.
Bear, I wonder if you the absolute irony in your own satement here.
You, like most others, come here to zero-hedge, to bitch and moan about the system, how it's broken, how it sucks, the evil this and that.
And yet you play don't you? I wonder who is the bigger fool here. Me sitting in the midst of it all and blogging it?
Further down the thread too, silly disingenuous argument, go back to your cave or whatever.
I guess mother culture has you firmly in her grip.
ORI
http://aadivaahan.wordpress.com
As I think that the strides we have "made" are far less significant from the knowledge that was lost by our tribal societies, I am going to have to disagree with you on this one. But your point is well taken.
Hey, anyone see Dr. Paul Craig Roberts today? The former Assistant Treasurie Secretary and "father of Reaganomics" discusses pensions, the doelarr, and Iran, among other things.
http://www.youtube.com/user/fairinfowar#p/u/17/ufYuZsCf4r8
dunno if you noticed, but that was the theme music from Conan The Barbarian he was playing at the end of the segment - fuck yeah! Tho I'm really not sold on all the conspiracy theory stuff
PCR knows his stuff, no conspiracy there. And as for Jones, I think he misses some points (nobody is perfect), but he does get the best guests around!
Quote from interview:
"I think everybody should have some sort of precious metal to see them through a period where the monie could be inflated away."
thanks for that link.
as for mister gonzalo lira and his rant on corporations, perhaps he forgot to take his medication? it was just last month that he said that the u.s. has turned in to a fascist police state. to mister gonzalo lira: take the red pill dewd. oh, and i loved your work in soldier of fortune.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soldier_of_Fortune_%28video_game%29
Well, you know, I was thinking more like: "What is the printing press for $500, Alex?"
I guess Corporation can work also... if you are an accomplished mental gymnast.
"Who would take over the corporate entity? Obvious: Someone who was interested in building it up.
"
Really?? I thought these days you take over a corp so you can short the shit out of it all the while you sell off massive CDO's, etc etc as you cook the books and beg for handouts??
Perfect!
Really?? I thought these days you take over a corp so you can short the shit out of it all the while you sell off massive CDO's, etc etc as you cook the books and beg for handouts??
Sure, just like you can exploit a worker. Do exploitative bosses mean labour has no value?
Most of the rocket technology used for Apollo was owned by the government, and when the people retired and died, that knowledge was lost. I've watched thousands of man-years of irreplacable knowledge kicked to the curb so that a few dozen executives can pay themselves $40M a year.
I once worked for a German private corporation. It's first responsibility was to provide employment, the second exports for Germany, and the third profits for the shareholders. The head guy probably made twice what their top engineer made. Most profits were put back into plant and equipment, because "earnings" were taxed instead of given to executives.
Thought-provoking post, though.
Yes, when I was a young thing just out of engineering school. I remember when the bosses of companies I used to work for only made about twice what us engineers made. We used to get bonuses, turkeys at Thanksgiving, hams at Xmas. If ya did something really well, the boss might even reward ya with a brand new car or a prepaid vacation. Summer company picnics were the norm. Tuition reimbursement for education. Stocks of the company for line and staff. Not to mention a decent salary, enough to live on. The bosses/owners didn't have the arrogance and pomposity they do today.
But that degraded quickly. By the time I reached my mid 20's, the era of the MBA hollowed out good, productive companies and corporations who treated their employees and communities well. The knowledge that has been lost, in many arenas, is sad and bad for the country. The day the FIRE "industries" took over the economy, we were/are, eventually, doomed.
the neighborhood I grew up in the 70s was white working class, but had lots of professionals too, it was only later in life, I realized how classless the neighborhood was. At a classmates Dad's funeral, I realized my friends Dad, was a PhD that ran a chemistry lab at 3M, the scientists and technicians that worked under him adored him as a manager, a scientist, coworker, and the managers at company said he was a great innovator a developer for the company, lead a whole team of people successfully....Their house was absolutely normal, smallish by today's standard in your basic, solid neighborhood, and they lived just like the rest of us, didn't even have the best house in the neighborhood...most of my classmates Dad's worked on factory lines, but lived in the same houses, neighborhoods. It never occurred to me then how equal economically people were. One of best friends Dad was also a 3M division manager with a PhD in Chemistry at Yale...again their house was an absolutely normal, 2000 sf house ...they took vacations to relatives in Europe and ate out more than other folks, but other than that, just like the rest of us...we all lived together in similar houses, with similar cars, many with cabins up north...teachers, line workers, hardware store guy, etc...Yeah, there were some snooty suburbs even back then that had stock brokers, big local businessmen, high end lawyers etc..., but 90 percent of us were in solid city neighborhoods, black or white, and professional and working class of very nearly same incomes, in same neighborhood.
Know limited liability
Know psychopathic behavior
I think I know the company you're talking about. If I'm right, then the "charitable" charade they promote is just that. Private corporations do not need to disclose numbers to anyone so it's doubtful the CEO is receiving 2x schmuck engineer salary. But if I'm wrong, then there's a company I'd like to be apart of.
Just work for .gov. The cherry gigs can yield residuals if you structure the deal right.
It all starts with the Heilmeier Questions. Provide the correct formula and skys the limit.
http://www.iarpa.gov/join3.html
omfg. part of me just died, from reading that.
I think where corporations went wrong is when they decided they were not second to either the individual or the state.
In Amerika, corporations became individuals, with constitutionally-protected rights, via the 14th Amendment. This will never be reversed until Amerika and the world lay in ruins.
In Amerika, corporations became government ... because they were already individuals. This will never be reversed until Amerika and the world lay in ruins.
They do not sleep, they only dream and desire. They cannot be killed and they cannot be punished. They are immortal and immoral. They can only consume, and they eat everything, including earth and sky and people. They are corporations, the human answer to the mythical vampire. They will suck our blood out by the gallons until we are consumed, and then they will vanish back into the dark corner of elemental slumber from which all great evils have arisen in their time. Then whoever survives and emerges beyond the era of the corporation will have a chance to do things differently.
No one reading this will be listed among those. The human heart and mind cannot bear so much abuse for so long and endure. But perhaps our dust will rejoice.
Preach!
I will preach. Until I see with my own eyes and hold with my hands the stake that was driven into the heart of the modern corporation. If I am at all loved by any of the multiple gods of this boundless universe then I will live to see that glorious dawn and the death of these corrupting, despoiling, enslaving entities.
Amen!
Well. If we have Kali the Destroyer on our side then there isn't much we cannot accomplish.
Let the Dance. Begin.
Awesome post! The corporation merely serves to turn the earth's natural resources into garbage. 99% of the stuff that's made ends up in the garbage dump in 6 months. It's damn wasteful and stupid. Running linear systems on a finite planet. Also no CEO deserves to earn 400x what the average bloke makes in his company. That's just plain theft. You might be good but you ain't that good.
That's why whoever invents the smell Processor for PCs with Smell emitter and smell library will be rich beyond belief. All the news that comes from the gulf will have the smell of the sea, the air, the people, the sea life , the birds and the oil that's killing them along with the death it's already caused. It will be hard to look at another "Oh it's that BP thing again, fucking liberals." video.
Locals on the scene - day 70:
Oil/Water samples from Gulf...VERY TOXIC:www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gq65E7rmO_k
I agree, not only are we kickin' ass and takin' names, but we will win and dust the ashes off our hands once again!
UncleFester: Cougar! What is best in life?
Cougar: To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women.
Thanks Cat Person: After I wrote the comment below then read the comment in between ours (that luvs the article) I was in >uh is everyone that clueless< land.
Thanks for some sanity.
The Red Amendment also made us slaves to said Corporate United States. LOL.
Um, may I humbly recommend that you up your dosages?...
No. Seriously. A lot.
It's called unalloyed hatred. Like any good tool, it can also serve as a weapon. With this and no more fires can be lit.
well, though we fundamentally disagree, you do write very well - so, touche... :-)
Well thank you. But please understand -- as honest confession -- that if I write well it is only because I do so from the heart, and from great conviction and love of humanity. These are all the things I have left for I am stripped of all else. And yet at the end of our long days, these are enough.
We run forward on the sand of eternal time even as time runs out, but here I will pause and create fires. At the end of the world I find words and I set fires with them.
Never give in to the machine that is the modern "corporation". Never give to the machine that is the modern corporation.
Cut out its foul heart (or the Human Resource department) and step on it.
When you work the floor do you punch people? I hope so.
Most companies have HRs to keep out the labor unions, only to find out later that HR is the labor union.
Agreed. They are now supranational. And, legally, they are considered persons. Without the consequences of a real human.
It is difficult to find any major point in the article which is true. The church didn't save or preserve civilization. Recover of ancient mathematics from the East saved Western civilization. Latin-centric history is silly. Churches closed the Gymnasia, and ushered in the dark ages. Islam banned printing presses, which thoroughly retarded the spread of learning in Islamic regions. The destruction of the church's authority and the recovery of ancient learning and new freedom of thought were simultaneous and related processes. The corporation didn't usher in learning, but rather power. The British Industrial Age was built by sole-proprietorships and partnerships. The corporations, whether as innovated by the East India Company or the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, changed power. Forever.
Watch the entire doco when you get a chance. Here's a snippet.
http://www.pbs.org/empires/islam/innomedicine.html
The Chinese stored much knowledge until Marco Polo and the traders could bring the ideas back to Europe.
Erasmus and Luther begat the eventual end of the divine right of kings, from which democracy (and the corporation) sprung forth.
Where is the end of the BS?
They cannot be killed? Arthur Anderson? Enron? MCI?
They cannot be punished? BP - $20 billion.
Governments and employment are harvesting the benefits of sustainable corporations.
This article is one of very best posted by ZH.
Outstanding work. A great read. Your quote here sums up quite nicely what is these things called "Corporations".
Of course, "Government" is mere "overhead". You might need it, like police and fire departments, but it is most certainly never a "productivity engine".
As an aside, in support of your "structure" or "soul" of the company being more than the sum of the parts, the Knowledge/Content management industry contrasts explicit and tacit knowledge: Explicit might be documented structure, rules, books, etc. that comprise the organization, while "tacit" knowledge is the ephemeral (not-documented) knowledge that exists within an organization. I think this relates to your discussion of structure.
For example, ten experienced individuals hired yesterday and which meet for the first time today are quite often not as "productive" as ten experienced individuals that have worked as a team for five years. The head count is the same, and the experience (on paper) may be the same, but the team that already has knowledge of each other's work habits, the company's products and history, and the current location of the bathroom is worth more.
True, governments aren't productivity engines. But they are corporations whose structures are designed to survive through the decades despite any and all previous generations' follies. Corporations, both public and private, are specifically designed to change and evolve to meet the times, but this is double-edged sword, simultaneously their greatest strength and weakness. For if they evolve to supplant or supersede the individual's natural rights, they will ultimately end.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
Agree, but IMHO that is corporations and governments in the sense of bureaucracies (their ability to transcend human lifetime).
A bureaucracy's first job is to feed itself. It's the same for a corporation or a government. Then, after feeding, it can go about its mission (if it is in the mood, if there is any incentive to pursue the mission).
However, there is pressure on the corporation to perform: If it does a bad job, it's gone. There is no such significant pressure on governments, which is why all major governments will default soon.
These are mere institutions among men, and imperfect. The difference is government's claim to legalized use of force (through which it coerces participation and performs all its functions), and the fact that corporations at least make an effort to deliver value (because they cannot compel customers otherwise).
I make exception for the current financial industry (they do not deliver value), and exist solely through the forced participation by the populace. Decades ago they delivered capitalization, and I would have supported them (even though I dislike the system structure itself).
I think of governments (and corporations) from a different prospective.
Often large corporations will use their market cap and credit worthiness to buy-out upstart competitors. Hell, it's just cheaper sometimes. When they do, they either dismantle or incorporate the competitor into the business structure (Borg). If a corporation continues to either outcompete or buy-out all their competitors, we get hegemony (i.e. no contrast). Once hegemony is achieved, equilibrium is reached, which is what they want..."as is" existence ad infinitum. I might add that once equilibrium is reached, there is no promotion, the caste system at that moment remains.
Same thing with Governments. One play in a One-Play Playbook. Create the problems and provide the solutions, when the solutions were what they wanted in the first place. "The Corporation" (U.S.) created the other corporations to bring about hegemony. Whether the private corporations control the public corporations or vice-versa is irrelevant...it's all about hegemony. (Think of the interaction of the U.S. gov't with BP in this context.) The U.S. wants exactly the same: gain market share, expand into every individual sphere of existence, take over and dictate every endeavor, in a word...hegemony.
The beauty of this evil is...if they successfully incorporate enough of the individuals in this world, there is no contrast to compare it to. No one will ever know there is an ocean outside of the fish tank.
The problem with corporations is the need for infinite growth, which ultimately leads to monopoly. Monopoly kills competition and in the end, isn't it competition that advances technology and society and not the corporation, itself?
And on a side note, the Dutch East India Company was very successful because it exploited the disparity in the gold/silver ratio between the west and east. The DEIC literally exchanged it's gold for silver in the west and exchanged the silver for gold in India making a huge profit by arbing the difference in the weights of the different coins once melted into bullion. It's the same gig the Catholic church had been doing for centuries which lead to the silver famine.
And let's not forget the "greatest" American corporation of all...the Federal Reserve. Lot a good that corp did.
At some level this is true (monopolies have occurred, requiring government to break them up), but mostly it doesn't happen. Rather, what we see are dis-economies of scale: The bigger you are, the less value you deliver, and you even cannibalize yourself.
IBM is getting smaller. HP is getting smaller. Xerox is getting smaller. Bell labs is practically gone (yes, in part government broke them up, but Lucent merely killed itself). While they do innovate at times, mostly they buy technology from a guy in the garage, because their size and dynamic do not allow them to deliver value (the must merely buy-and-package-and-distribute innovation created elsewhere).
Large companies kill themselves. In the "real" world, oligopolies really only exist when corporations get governments to sponsor them such that competition is not possible, like the current Moody's, Fitch, and S&P agencies: Their product is so poor that nobody would use them if government did not force it.
Your reference to the Federal Reserve is even better: It only exists because of government coercion upon the populace.
The problem isn't corporations; the problem is government sponsorship of corporations such that the corporation has no incentive to deliver value (the problem is the bureaucracy can feed itself despite the fact that it delivers no value).
Is what you're describing not the very definition of fascism?
Yes.
“As entrepreneurs innovate, they reap economic rewards. Production then expands and new forms of economic organization emerge, such as the modern firm, which grows to capture economic opportunities. As the size of the firm increases, so too does its bureaucracy. The functions of ownership and control gradually separate. Eventually, the owners find that their connection to, and knowledge of, the economic process has been severed. They lose the ability to see the necessity of social institutions, such as private ownership and voluntary contract - institutions without which there would be no economic progress. Isolated from economic reality, their sympathy for the capitalist system begins to wane, and, with it, the social support for the institutions that form the foundation of capitalism. These render the capitalist system open to attack from hostile parties.”
- Joseph Schumpeter
The problem with corporations is the need for infinite growth, which ultimately leads to monopoly.
It is not necessary for a corporation to have infinite growth. Owners want returns and increasing returns are better. However, investors in CDs are glad to get what they get and the return does not increase. Attracting investment does not necessarily have to promise increasing returns, just better returns, whatever that may mean.
Any provider of service will attempt to get a monopoly, even governments. The Postal Service first comes to mind. Additional modern examples are the take over of the energy supplies by the states. generally corporate monopolies are not very successful, but govt. monopolies are difficult to ever remove.
Corporations matter very much. They are entities used by folks to avoid all those unnecessary things, like being a decent person. They are constructed as Frankenstein's Monster, with all the rights of a living person, but with out the need for rules of conduct of a person.
This is about three articles over the past short period which are, in my humble opinion, not written by folks who know the field about which they are writing. Now they may be Econ Ph.D.s, but they are talking their book, or talking whatever book they were educated from.
A person in a corporation is able to divorce responsibility for actions of their corporation onto the corporation. This does not leave the responsibility for that action with a person. It leaves it with no one. And ultimately no one is responsible.
Corporations are an device created by people who wish to shirk their duty to themselves.
To themselves.
Agreed, LeBalance
Corporations are tools of elite wealth to extract rent from the masses with minimal risk...
"I will argue that the dissolution of the corporation is the sine qua non of democracy..."
Rob Newman
Cambridge educated Historian... sort of...
I respectively disagree, corporatism and democracy are a perfect match. Democracy is the rule of the gang, the corporation is the gang.
If corporation is 51% of the population. Although funded mass media has created the lifestyle image that people seek to attain so it's easy for people to think that it couldn't be achieved without their favorite brands.
Is that not the essence of branding? A temporary sense of increased self-worth for the consumer.
corporations exist solely for the purpose of shielding wealthy individuals from any negative consquences of their behavior and to evade taxation on profits. period. You can be sure if shareholders shared legal liability that companies would be run very differently
Agreed. Hence, the lack of the need to be a decent human. : )
Then they would be run specifically in order to do nothing, as the liability risk would outweigh any benefit in this U.S. post-modern litigation era...wait...
Please read the above statement as present tense.
Actually, I think that it was technology that enabled it's own preservation. Reliable long range ships and navigation, for example, made it possible to spread technology over a wide area, making it less likely to be extinguished via local catastrophes or entropy. It is ironic that the antikythera clockwork was recovered from the bottom of the ocean. The technology probably wouldn't have been lost if they had just emailed the specs over.
Corporations do what they were designed to do: make money. In general they don't really care about preserving technology unless it achieves that end.
This is why they are an essential part of our current civilization—above any religion, second only to the individual and the state.
I acknowledge your point but I remind you that no State or corporation has ever been martyred for it's God. None have ever worked themselves to death so that their children mught eat and live. None have ever bled to death on a battlefield so that others of it's own might live.
The State and corporations exist to serve us. They have no status as peers by virtue of the fact that the highest sacrifices are made by individuals. They are servants and their interests are subordinate to our interests. They exist at our pleasure, as we delared many years ago.
Let us be frank and recognize that evil men hide their deeds behind organizational facades. Public or private office should not be a shield for the crimes of individuals rather it should mandate the severest punishment for those crimes.
Your post made me think of how Yves Smith, in her book, Econned, cited the advent of the publicly owned investment bank as one of the big problems in the financial industry. She named the first significant firm to have an IPO in the early 70's and, shockingly, said that the vampire squid was one of the last in 1999. The result of all these firms going public instead of being partnerships was that they were no longer playing with their own money. It was other peoples' money. And, so, the determination to behave in a fashion that didn't take unnecessary risks largely went away. The determination to behave in a way that evinced a long term perspective went away. It wasn't their money any more. Partnerships were *much* healthier for everyone else. But the IPO gave the partners of the day huge windfalls. And with the help of the ludicrous notion of capitalism without failure the bailout culture has further insulated the people running the investment banks from the consequences of their actions.
This article has some important things right. The VOC was the all important breakthrough from proprietorship to limited liability corporation. Although I would argue that the development of the LLC was more significant as a means for managing risk (and encouraging prudent risk taking) not so much for preserving technology. The greatest such entity before the VOC was probably the Medici banking/business empire which owed a large part of it's success to the shit-luck of having one successive competent male heir after another take control at the right time. Keeping it in the family usually isn't the best way to perpetuate business greatness and it will be interesting to see what happens to Fidelity Investments in a few years for this very reason (if there's any marketplace left to invest/in that is)
Anyway, kudos to Gonzalo but it's a shame you have to go to a cutting edge, bad boy finance blog to read something like this. This history should have been part of the mandatory curriculum in American high schools for the past three decades.
It probably is in places like Singapore.
Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle historical trilogy covers this whole area and the 17th C. scientific revolution very well.
I was skeptical when I first started reading this article but I agree that the author has a point. I would only add that unfortunately, for the larger corps today, innovation seems to represent a threat. It seems like new innovative companies are bought and destroyed by dinosaur corps so the dinosaurs can keep producing the same product with a different color. I think the author should recognize that some technology does get lost, and quite a bit, though likely at a much slower rate than in the past.
Some here have mentioned that corps are evil because their goals are not in line with humanity or whatever perceived telos humanity has, but we have to keep in mind that corps are put together to make money, not to help humanity. Knowledge preservation is a side effect.
Finally, I'd like to add that I still don't understand speculative buying of stock that doesn't pay dividends. Why would you want to own it? So you can pray that some day you can sell it for more than you bought it for? Shouldn't they be paying you from their profits?
So true and I fight with this everyday. I have 8 patents to my name and would have 100 if the company didn't use them as an instrument of capture and ambush.
Well yeah if the environment evolves or is molded into a state that is hostile to free enterprise then that sort of destroys the whole premise and virtue of an LLC. And yes I know we have already arrived at that point in many areas now (and have before in the trust busting days for instance). That's a big problem and frankly as the god of merchants I'm pissed.
The last thing a very large corporation wants is for some guy in a garage to invent a widget that makes their product obsolete overnight. Not so shockingly the human beings behind the mega-corp then proceed to take all kinds of not very free market friendly actions to avoid such a scenario. How some people who grasp this but fail to see that the same motivations and incentives also apply to the human beings behind mega-government is beyond me.
Speculative, non-dividend paying stock is not for the faint of heart but many a mega-success wouldn't have been possible without it. For starters the company is raising money in the equity markets because the lack of current cash flow means the bond market is a non-starter. So its a lottery ticket for many but a believe-in-the-product story for others. Besides, what does it say about the story/product/company (so the thinking goes) if they can't think of a better use of capital than to dole it out to shareholders?
Thanks - your insight is appreciated.
Should I buy up some Tesla?
Maybe. Their upcoming, 100% green economy model could be a category killer:
http://cdn1.ioffer.com/img/item/139/777/073/23jQ.jpg
Nice. Modern version:
http://surreycompany.com/images/Surreyride.jpg
4 sets of pedals available, the worker pedals while the engineer and manager watch to make sure all is going well. Meanwhile, the banker is hitching a load to the back...
Fuck Yeah! McRib! CHOMP!!!
maybe we are in the dying ages of the corporation age .. now it is all crookology until we slide forever into the new Dark Ages.. Dante's Inferno here we come!!!
http://danteworlds.laits.utexas.edu/indexi.html
Corporatism didn't become widespread, even in Europe, until the mid 1800's. Thus, the timelines don't match up.
Good try though!
As someone else said--the printing press. Wide communication combined with rapid reproduction allowed a much wider breadth of knowledge to spread faster than it was destroyed.
Gonzalo Lira, Novelist-Filmmaker!
Seriously, though: That was excellent.
I still think the printing press had much more to do with technological preservation. And I think your thesis as it applies to smaller corporations doesn't really hold up, and I'd guess that probably 1% of corporations have actually outlived the founders. [I'd be surprised if shares in small glass factories weren't closely held and simply passed on to first born sons.]
Nevertheless...It was very well written and you bring up some compelling points.
[An easy summer read, tangentially related to your essay would be David Liss' novel: "Conspiracy of Paper." It is set in 18th century London against the advent of stock speculation and the brewing fight between the Bank of England and the South Sea Company. He's an excellent writer.]
Unfortunately, in the later stages of the cycle, corporate capitalism becomes obsessed with gaining market share through monopolistic practices. All that matters is corporate profits. Once a dominant pricing cartel or monopoly is acheived, innovation stops as there is no need to improve the product or service as the consumer has no choice.
Monopoly is the enemy of free enterprise, market dominance insures inefficient high prices
and unrealisticly high corporate profits.
Case in point: GM, Citibank (and others)... as part of their monopolistic practices, they have bought off legislators and have passed laws making economic failure illegal.
pmar
Indeed.
Corporations ... and other chain gangs.
You said:
"ever since human beings figured out how to make their own food."
You are a moron, a very smart one, but still a moron.
he is talking about fine French cuisine.. anything before that should NOT be considered 'food' by civil people,,, so u are either barbaric or a fool as well
Oh I'm a barbarian for sure. I do eat well though. The "wet coast" of BC serves up some fine eats right on the beach.
+1000 - terrific post.
I don't know that I agree with it, necessarily, but this post and others like it are what differentiates ZH from the rest of the websticle innertubes.
When one becomes aware of all that was lost between the Ancient and Modern eras, one wonders how much farther advanced we would have been had the Dark Ages not supervened.
Perhaps we would already be virtual personalities housed in indestructible, infinitely-lived nanoscopic solar-powered vessels. I know I would be - and mine would have a racing stripe. (That's how we'll end up, by the way - and relatively soon... which is why advanced aliens [those who have already made the jump] could not possibly be interested in anything we have to offer: to paraphrase Feynman, Hawking would be a laughing stock if he wasn't a drooling mess).
One of my fave historical figures is Heron of Alexandria, whose aeliopile was a primitive steam turbine - he used them to make stream-driven, coin-operated doors and washing-water dispensers for temples, and had planned to use a large aeliopile to drive a water-pump for a fire engine (fires being a problem in the relatively-high-rise dense urban areas) but couldn't get backing - there being no IPO market, I guess. He also invented an algorithm for obtaining the square root of a number, which remains among the most efficient in existence. Autant que je sache, that's the only of his inventions that was carried forward through the Dark Ages without needing to be rediscovered.
Anyhow - let's just say that if homo cheneyensis (the parasitic subspecies of humanity that lives by theft of our effort) decides to set the world on fire, having a corporation as guardian of assets and ideas won't amount to much because major cities wil be reduced to sheets of greenish molten glass, and not many corporate HQs are located in the countryside.
In other words, perhaps it was not a lack of a suitable vessel for the maintenance of information/assets: the thing that caused the loss was the wanton destruction brought on by pissing contests between different claques in the degenerate parasitic class. Political ponerology tells you that.
And perhaps (again) it was the advent of relatively low-cost mechanisms for replication and transportation of information (the printing press then, the intertubes now) that permitted technology transfer (and storage) at lower cost. After all, if there had been 20 million servers each holding an encrypted copy of all of Diogenes' pithy sayings, some of them would have survived, even absent corporate backing.
Cheerio
GT
raliegh was wrong. the weight of the smoke is heavier than the difference of the ash and the unmoked cigar because the smoke is oxidized, it carries oxygen bonded to the formerly unoxidized (unsmoked) material which is calculated as the difference.
but...for all intents and purposes it's pretty damn close.
Don't forget the miniscule amount of matter that converts to energy in the form of heat. The energy then dissipates into the surroundings adding to the earths entropy. This matter no longer exists. So every time you have a cigarette, you're doing your part in reducing the earths mass but raising it's temperature.
You have to write out the whole equation and then mass balance. CO2, CO and H2O (plus residuals) are given off in the smoke. If you are going to be a smart ass, at least make sure your answer is complete.
Talk about not being able to figure out how to get laid in a whorehouse with a fistfull of gold. Raliegh's in there peeling off the queen's knickers and you guys are still standing in the hallway arguing over formulas that haven't been invented yet.
Touche'
If it's knowledge preservation you're after, then there are many examples of how this is achieved in the absence of a corporation. eg. If there was a religion based on computer technology and that technology was sold to you as your path to greatness in the afterlife, or doom if you dissent, then it goes to say that chips, bit and bytes will be on the minds of many for centuries to come.
And on the subject of computers, I believe this is the start of how vast pools of information can instantly be lost forever with a single hard drive crash. A paperless society holds you victim to ignorance when the power is shut off.
PS. I believe it was Islam that preserved the works of the Greeks when Europe was plunged into the dark ages. See Bagdad and Cordoba for instance.
Irish monks - Ned
IMO most larger corporations are truly stupid.
Pooling resources and talent is hardly a new human invention. The reason that these technologies are lost is because their creation becomes dependent on a central plan, or worse yet a single central planner. It is when preservation of this central plan and its necessities override greater necessity that it becomes a real danger to continued progress. It inevitably begins to view such needs as simple variables that need to be eliminated, usually with police state tactics and war. The planners are often oblivious of their ever increasing irrelevance, and see the people's indifference and struggle to address needs in the face of their machinations as a sign that they are needed to restore order on the people's behalf for their benefit. Our current situation is nearing this level of complete and utter dysfunction and it will only continue to get worse.
I would argue that central plans are only wise in situations where the goal is attainable within a generation or less and have it disband upon completion, otherwise you should plan on allowing necessity dictate its course long term and if that's the case then there wasn't any need for a plan at all, now was there? Five Corporations
Well can you blame them when the trend is up uP UP?
http://www.epi.org/economic_snapshots/entry/webfeatures_snapshots_20060621/
This guy is a dumbass. Pure sophistry trying to connect the dots to fit a theory. Tons of assumptions.
I would say it's more about reaching synergy across many different technologies that did it than corporations. Of course, in a fertile land for it to grow....*cough*...not U.K.
That and the printing press, allowing information, schematics, theories, etc, to be cheaply and easily produced, copied, and TRANSFERRED around trade routes. Thus if one society or culture was hit with something, most of the important knowledge was not lost.
It wasn't the corporation that allowed 'technology' to not go backwards. That's pure sohpistric idiocy. One that is itself full of assumption.
First off ones has to forget that even though we've moved forward, there's also been backslides...usually because of wars, famine, diseases, and oh yeah...economic shocks. How many people living in 1946 Europe felt like they had progressed from the 1800's? No they had regressed. What propelled them forward. Marshall Plan.
When diseases rampaged across lands people forget that if it was over 100 years ago, people thought god did it to you, or it was the devil, or a curse. No, it's called GERM THEORY. Since then, we developed at least temporary ways to fend them off, and thus you don't have ~half of ones children die before adulthood as a general rule, rather than the exception. Plus stakeburning reaches all time lows.
If anything, it isn't the corporation, but free people, embarking on their quest to be free, to invent, to build, etc, that allowed people to get out from serfdom and better their lives.
It wasn't British Corporations
It was the United States Consitution
But not as a whole, as we all know the predecessor of the constitution was the Magna Carta (not directly of course), thus European culture, unshackled from monetarism advanced greatly in lieu of it's imperialist constrained cousins.
We advanced, they stagnated. The greatness of America was born as much out of American hard work as it was by imperialist idiocy.
Monetarist cultures, stagnate. Which is why America has only been living off it's heritage since the very least 1945, if not 1913. That's how well free people, (actually free) did things. It's why our infrastructure is crumbling, bridges falling...because we stopped raising our infrastructure over 40 years ago!
I swear alot of idiots, just don't know history...or obviously common sense.
But there is even MORE idiocy than he presents. That is, that we have PASSED the point of which he speaks. I know, and any SANE person KNOWS, WE HAVE NOT PASSED ANY MARKER THAT GUARANTEES THE HUMAN RACE MOVES FORWARD TECHNOLOGICALLY.
If anything, the corporations, the monetarism is about to take us down, which will lower technology levels in use by people across the world, and may end up in a century long dark ages, and that might be if we're LUCKY!
It was never the corporations, it was free people, in a free system, during an opportune time when technology in many areas formed a synergy to develop into what we had.
Was it the big corporations that took us to the moon?
Was it the big corporations that said we'll turn the factories into war factories for boats, planes, and tanks for WWII?
Does a big corporation think, actually think, ?ever? let alone do any long term planning? I say no in reality, because a corporation isn't a real person, and I say no because we all know who leads many corporations are dumbass shills who couldn't create anything if you gave them a box of crayons and put them in a room with pure white walls.
It wasn't 'the church' who saved europe. It was that the church had monks, and they liked to preserve things like books, by writing books, again...no printing press back then. Plus it was self interest. A bunch of monks who can't read the bible, can't exactly spread the word. Can it?
So the author starts with a maybe, takes multiple idiot leaps of faith to come to an even more idiotic conclusion. What a dumbass.
Only a corporation will improve carts. What are you an idiot? Where the hell do we see capital investment ANYWHERE in corporate America? There isn't, at least nothing substantial when compared to what was, and what should be, or answers the question 'is it sufficient?'. Also this author tends to think we don't know how stupid a person is to realize they needed a good cart, or strong horse/donkey/mule to be better.
East India Company, *cough British Petroleum cough*, only bled people, and societies dry. Imposing their will and austerity in the name of imperialist profits. "Now you can take a stake". No, in a corporation, you have limited liability, thus you have LIMITED STAKE in things going bad. Thus, the average person had much more STAKE in the matter of his business doing better, than corporate owners do.
Today's productive units are called machine tools. We let them die, so they aren't around. In fact, we SHREDDED our machine tool sector, like as in metal bits, and sold the scrap to guess where....CHINA!
In this fucked up world, productive units cannot exist, it fucks up the inflation, or not. Either way, we don't have productive units staying around because of corporations, we instead having them shredded and sold as scrap.
No, corporations are made for PROFIT, nothing else. In fact if you aren't doing everything possible for PROFIT, you are actually hurting your shareholders, and odds are won't be around much longer, replaced by a bigger shill who will make the 'tough' myopic short term choice to satisfy this quarter's PROFITS.
Besides, this author is an idiot when he says one person building such a cart, can transfer it who will continue to improve upon it, as if corporations build ONE thing, then IMPROVE it. They don't. It's all different, and the knowledge that is retained, isn't exclusively retained by corporations. A corporation isn't one of anything, so the analogy is quite a bit off and is incorrect and thus irrelevant.
Where the hell do corporations have assets? I see debts, that through budget cuts and austerity will be tried to be legitimized when they shouldn't be. I see lots of (borrowed) cash sitting on the sidelines, that's about it.
Yes now with a corporation, you can now bullshit everybody to think your shoes are just as good as the old cobbler who retired. except you don't know left from right, but hey, at least you got the 'name'.
Therefore instead of having business you could somewhat trust in terms of product, you have businesses that are name only, like just about all of them at this point it seems these days.
I mean who needs to actually produce the good or service the way it was intended, when you can pay some money and try to fool everybody into paying a premium to you for crappy work you think is made by the retired cobbler instead of in a vietnamese sweatshop by some poor illiterate sap who thinks 25 cents an hour is bank...and equally luxurious is running water.
Who buys a company? Somone who wants to build a PROFIT, not UP.
This author assumes like an ass. Oh a person buys a corporations to build it up. No, he buys it to profit, and if sleight of hand works, they use it. However it's done, whatever you do, profit is the point. Not 'building' it up.
Sure in the attempts to profit SOMETIMES people build stuff up. (especially when a pissed off public who has put in faithful public servants push back and pass laws)...but we don't have them anymore, and even when it was at it's max was drastically short in numbers...but still large enough to change things because back then, dumbasses were pointed out and laughed at like the idiots they are....paging Sarah Palin, Barney Frank, Barack Obama, Boehner, Greenspan, a million others.
I love the part where he compares putting a bunch of chemicals together and compares it to a human. Then compares why a corporation does indeed put things together correctly, like the human body does with these elements through existing. Umm not really.
First off, at some point, a hamburger is a hamburger, a chair is a chair. If McDonalds was to be obliterated off the map, I'm sure I could survive eating tons of other brands of hamburgers. In other words, many times, it's really just the name, and relationships, contracts, and locations you are buying, not an actual synergy that will be transferred. (again if the cobbler retires, the knowledge, experience, and thus quality will suffer). Substitues exist.
The fact is, things change, but free people, with easy access to knowledge, retain abilities by their predecessors much more easily and thus retain more. Or do only corporations allow that? Which is why it must be hard to fathom how the knowledge of say farming amongst ancient cultures was maintained. I mean the way he says it, you'd expect if a person died, that's it, no more farming, because the guy is gone. No, he passed it on. Knowledge can be passed without corporations. It was. Sometimes the situation prevented that knowledge from being transferred, and last I checked corporations didn't invent teaching.
Best practices wasn't invented with the corporation, it was a natural occurrence between stakeholders in times much more serious since they didn't have a magical all-curing printing press. If you had no crops, you didn't eat.
Seeing how many mistakes the corporations keep repeating, it looks like knowledge is NOT being passed in a corporation. But then again, they have limited liability, and thus don't have as big of a stake as a non corporate entity.
Hell look at the yellow stream media. They get the information that day, and screw it up before they even air or print anything. Most of them are corporations. So knowledge isn't exactly flowing free there.
The reason why the clock knowledge was lost was because there was no corporate mechamism to keep it? Yeah fucking right. Wars and monetarism no doubt led to that. Plus some shit we can't even imagine no doubt. The fact is, besides the prime example of war, famine, disease, we simply don't know. But if you look at literature it seemed filled with all the things needed to lose knowledge.
You know monetarism, like we have now with our corporations. The same monetarist that directly brought you WWI, WWII, Vietnam, Gulf War I, II, afghanistan, and coming up probably Iran. We don't see any connections there do we?
Want to see a corporation lose knowledge fast? Supoena them. Ha ha.
So when the nuclear bombs wipe out cities, and suddenly 1000 years from now someone has their shiny new Apple II (but they call it a Rally), and say that their brand new corporations are why they have a computer, instead of realizing all they brought was the still lingering radiaiton effects whose original occurrence was what lost them the magnificent Apple II for 1000 years. (not knowing we had stuff even more powerful)
The thing is when a person sells the company, or whatever, things are changed. The ability that was there now isn't. That knowledge is lost, unless it is retained. A corporation can retain it. Or not. If not in a corporation, someone's APPRENTICE or the like could retain it. Of course the apprentice retains it, it's his future, his trade, his livelyhood. What about the corporation? Is their goal always to retain it? Nope, because their goal is PROFIT, not the retention of knowledge.
If anything we lose KNOWLEDGE with corporations because when consolidation and mergers happen, one side's corporate culture wins, and another loses.
I remember Peter Piper Pizza, and Pistol Pete's Pizza. Two great Phoenix area pizza shops that became one about 15 years ago. Both had pretty good pizza. But Peter Piper, bought out Pistol Pete's. What happened?
Well Peter Piper got some great locations, and the like, but what did us Phoenicians get food wise? Well one menu had to go, and it of course was Pistol Pete's. Now I like Peter Piper more, but I also liked Pistol Pete's. Well now we've lost Pistol Pete, and that pizza's signature taste. Now I'll live without it, BUT, it IS a loss of knowledge, brought on by corporations this author would have you believe is the reason knowledge is retained. Again there are substitues, but quality nuanced knowledge was still loss as a direct result of corporate activities.
No more butter pellets on top of your pizza, etc. That's gone forever, at least the exact combination was. Although one could say an opportunity exists for a butter pellet topped pizza here in the Phoenix area.
Knowledge transcends money and corporations. The author completely forgets this. It's separate. It exists outside the realm, the corporation either chooses to adopt and retain the info, or reject and replace. With a 3rd very unlikely possibility that they keep the info and ideas on the backburner.
But one thing a corporation can and does regularly do, is decide to ditch completely good knowledge. If Pistol Pete's was a company that was dissolved when the owner died, at least the recipe and process could have been passed on to a relative or apprentice. For the corporation that wasn't an option really. They bought Pistol Pete's, the peter piper menu stays. A small spice of life is removed.
Want another example, think New Coke. Except that time, the corporation did not get away with it.
Coca-cola wanted to ditch the knowledge that was their original formula. So as one can see, corporations aren't exactly the retainers of knowledge. In fact many times they wish to change it.
Man I could go on, as I've really only addressed some of the obvious idiotic parts of this retarded piece. I feel much dumber for reading this sophistric shit piece. But something tells me that's why ZH put it up there, to be blasted, and for that I thank them.
Of course all these benefits come about because of corporations, and only because of corporations, and we wouldn't have any without them. LMFAO.
The real question should be, how many MORE benefits would we have retained and expanded on beyond that which we have through corporations, if we simply stopped believing their shit don't stink and realize that most times they've only done in what was in their own best interests which happened to almost always be against your individual's interest.
The other thing the guy forgets, that the productive powers of labor in the new world, led to a backdraft effect onto the British. We improved things for us, it improved things for them. It wasn't the corporations that did it, it was the anti-entropic nature of the America settler.
Corporations entrophy, especially monopolistic, imperialist ones. Sit on the cash cow. Make John Madden Football from 1990 to 2010, sell over 20 different versions one year at a time, and have really provided approximately 4 games to people, with small updates. Oh you bought 20 madden games? No, you bought multiple copies of almost the exact same game. Seriously the game only has aggregate change that meets the definition of 'new game', every 5 or so years. (hope you don't own EA ha ha).
Had the clockmaker been part of a corporation, it would have also been destroyed when the society collapsed. Of course like today, the money people would have fled. They would have moved to say Santirini, where their descendants would have had a blast.
But when people understand that human beings are capable of discovering such devices, then screwing society up so badly it is lost for thousands of years, maybe they might think, why not again? Why should I let a corporation, or a monetarist system screw up the world badly again? Maybe we won't lose everything, but imagine what could be lost without electricity for a generation. All it needs to do is happen.
The corporation, won't have any advantage of trying to keep this knowledge alive as anyone else...but me thinks that in such a situation most people would be thinking about survival, rather than retaining all knowledge. Did they save the Titanic's library? White Star was more concerned with shitting their pants knowing everyone was screwed.
Again, they'll be off to their Santorini, their Alexandria, etc, etc...probably in S. America....like Bush's land holdings.
I love it when he says, the knowledge was lost BECAUSE there was no corporations.
Was he there? Maybe he's been snorting too much cocaine like his Timecop idol.
This guy is truly a fucking idiot. So is anyone that believes him.
what type of idiot condescends in every other sentence? I see you contradict your own points many times.. if you are trying to provide an example of how our kaleidoscope of existence will always show contradiction amid its chaos, then sure, you did an empecable job.
Righteous jmc, just righteous...Can a brother get a Amen?!
Now THAT'S what I call a stream of consciousness!
An excellent post and a good argument for reforming corporate governance laws to preserve the positive contributions corporations make to our society. Specifically, we need to ensure that corporations are not merely vessels for legalized theft, vandalism and embezzlement.
I agree with the premise that the corporate entity has played an important role in our recent history, through preservation and transfer of technology, among other things. However, I disagree with any implication that the corporation can necessarily be tamed or mastered as well as any implication that to continue progressing exponentially, we must continue to embrace corporations. Effectively, this essay is a near-sighted historical narrative that provides little insight into the present and future... and may actually give the wrong impression about the same. In short, I see little, if any, relevance to the general postings of this website.
The more accurate view of corporations is to compare them to the fuel portions of a rocket that are jettisoned at high altitude. They are merely a temporary vehicle of our evolution. Like everything else, they must be refined, retooled, and repeated in different format... but, more likely than not, they will be wound up and then rolled out after most of us have died or otherwise lost the ability to protest the new red carpet hastening their arrival in all their former glory... again, like everything else seems to be.
Even if I agreed with the author's premise, what good are technological progress or bureaucratic efficiency without a soul?
Don't hand this in as your dissertation.
Read Coase's Theory of the Firm first if you do.
As a non-accountant, I think the double-entry accounting technique was the most significant advance in human organization over the past millennium. Not the corporation. There are obviously significant gains from specialization of production and the constant working relationship of a partnership or corporation, but it's not necessary.
The store of assets and knowledge is an interesting line of thought though.
But the qualitatively disturbing development over this crisis has been the complete disregard for accounting principles when the accepted techniques yield answers that are politically untenable. If I apply Aristotelian logic of take away one (accounting or the corporation) and see which you miss the most, I think accounting supersedes the corporation.
No offense, but I think you are behind the times. Double-entry accounting, that's so 1980. Haven't you heard, it's more like exponential-entry accounting now. How else do you get a quadrillion derivatives on a few trillion physical assets?
10^3 Bitchez!
True. Now I can just pull cell across in excel and model my own balance sheet. Weee!
Which leads me to my second point, DACEeasy was the beginning of the end of civilization.
Weeeee! Look at that, I'm rich.
Catullus,
You are right. Mises has the same observation considering the birth of capitalism. Keeping technology alive is just the byproduct.
Double entry book keeping, the biggest invention of humankind.
I think your point on double entry accounting is a very good one. I think a political/economic/cultural system is as good as its checks and balances that keep it in balance even when vigilance is lacking and the herd or the elites try to push it out of balance. The rule of law, all the governance checks and balances we have in our constitution, and even checks against tyranny of democracy (courts etc). Transparency and proper accounting systems are very important too. I keep seeing countries messed up because of corrupted elections. Even the dictators now see they have to hold elections, so they do, like say in Iran, and rig them. If we had the equivalent of gold standard for elections, as you might for accounting practices, say purple thumbs, paper ballots in public viewed, secured boxes, cracked open in public to count at precinct level, votes posted at precinct level before tallied central, and needless to say, no black box secret, unchecked by public software, we'd have something.
But of course, even the best systems to keep things in balance will come undone if people are not vigilant.
I tried reading the whole thing.
I really did.
LeBalance / Mr.Cougar and others obviously have more patience than me.
It is relatively easy to get a prescription for Ritalin, have your parents bring you to the clinic. The doctor will be happy to cash in on a return customer.
Gonzalo, you're sounding suspiciously, and increasingly like Aetius Romulous at screambucket.com
Probably the clockmaker's guild had their retirement age raised to 62.
You gotta wonder about he cementmaker's guild in Rome too - after the brilliance of the dome of the Panteon that was about it.
The repository of Greek knowledge and primary vector of the Renaissance wsas via the Arab/Berber civilizations of Morocco and Spain rather than the Catholic Church.
www.geocentrism.com
I would simply argue that morally borrowing from tomorrow to pay for today since the 1600's is going to end in physical tragedy... soon.
Why has there not been a substantial loss of technology and culture over the last 400 years?
Its not due to the corporation. Something tells me that the scientific method as well as advances in agriculture production led to more time being able to be devoted to other pursuits than scraping a living from the ground, etc... might just have something to do with it instead of attributing it to corporations. Also something called the printing press allowing widespread dissemination of knowledge and therefore making it harder to 'lose' knowledge than if its known to a very small group of people that never disclose their secrets in the form of patent filings, books, etc..., that allow later individuals to have a head start from that point instead of having to recreate from scratch. such as the Greeks... Keep up this kind of stuff and I might have to ask "Dick Cheney, is that you?"
Nice post.
The largest non-state financial organization before the Dutch company was the Knights Templar, from the 900s to the 1100s. They were destroyed for being too much of a menace to the monarchs of the time. The corporation needed the trust that it would not be destroyed by the whims of the state- the 1600s were when this level of governmental restraint started.
But as is common with such screeds, the Arabs get no respect. They didn't just keep European knowledge alive, they developed it while Europe was in "the bad bits".
GM? Chrystler**2? GS? MS? Restraint?
- Ned
Here's a link that illustrates the timeline (last revised in 2002) of the progress of the rights of individual versus the rights of the corporation since the 13th and 14th amendments to the US Constitution (no surprise who is rising emergent and at whose expense...) The years 1889 and 1996 are pretty freaky bookends.
Makes you wonder if, not unlike the timing of the Patriot Act, the spirit of the 14th amendment was authored well in advance of the 'fortuitousness of history' and was left to have only the basest levels of human nature fill in the details....
"Feudalism, you're going to need a re-write, for the time being we're going to call you the 'rights of the individual' but dammit we're having a helluva time shaking that slavery habit...you know, I think we can work with those efficiencies of industrial production and we can all be happy...and by that I mean WE can be really rich and you can be distracted by the promise of happiness...[or the pursuit therein...good luck with that;)...they're called the courts so it must be a game...(no wagering please)]".
http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:442e2pi5c4UJ:www.californiadem...
I think this link illustrates the need for traditional corporate charters as envisoned and standardised by early American government where corporate charters were made to matter because they were limited, focused and required approval for renewal based on proving a public need by charter and recorded deed.
http://reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate_accountability/history_corporation...
Perhaps this is the missing context of this post?
Technology is invariably lost because it falls victim to selfishness, avarice, corruption or a slightly better competitor. In a free market it is the latter, in reality it is the cartelization present in the former's undeniable reality.
That said, free markets are open markets and the law of corporations today do not favor free enterprise capitalism but instead the mercantilism of the lowest common denominator .
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose
Utopia has no qualifications limiting the individual's potential when it comes to the benefits of a public good.
Thought there would be more discussion about the creative destruction aspect of all this. Too often we are focused on the structure and not the product. How powerful was GM? What is it now? Kodak, RCA? There are many other examples.
Technology changes the world in profound ways and its happening right now. The internet is a powerful force in society, politics and "corporate" America. There are many corporations being taken apart by technology and thankfully no church, Catholic, Mormon, etc. will have to be the archivist. Hopefully our free society will also survive.
May be development of corporations was an organizational innovation of the first order that changed the world but I'd need a ton more data and careful comparison to buy what you are selling.
First, what was chicken and egg.....was modern European economic dominance, permanent global reach, and technology the result of corporations or were corporations the result of European imperialism and technology inherited from the world after the dark ages?...notice the birth date given to corporations...1602..there were a few more things going in European trade at that time then just a spice trade....Slave markets came first, then stock markets....slave ships came first, including all the navigational, manufacturing, nautical, and organization capabilities that went into building these technological advanced genocidal fleets, then came Lloyds of London afterwords.
Corporations are the only way to preserve knowledge? Guilds didn't do that? Institutions of learning supported by religions, royalty, political orgs didn't preserve knowledge and speciality technology? Families didn't teach their descendants, tribes and regions didn't pass on innovations in agriculture, building, transportation. What of all the innovations of China that lived on for centuries or millenia...was a corporation needed to maintain knowledge of how to farm silk, build amazing irrigation systems, make porcelain? Secret societies didn't pass on knowledge? Books in libraries throughout the world didn't preserve knowledge. How did Europe re-gain ancient knowledge after dark ages? largely via Arabs that had preserved Roman, Greek, Persian knowledge. Indian and Chinese (thanks for the numbers India- Roman numerals sucked and made it toough to do arithmetic) and revived Egyptian knowledge technology made impact too, all through books, schools, religious support, no corporations needed thank you.
And no civilization kept technology for more than 400 years that we can brag on, due to lack of corporations? Have you read any history of China's technology, dynasties, must of their knowledge was not lost but buried in histories written by Westerners that inherited their knowledge. What of Mayans, the had at least 750 years of height of technology of classical period without corporations, what of the Moors for 800 years in Iberia (we just now discovering mathematically complex patterns immortalized in mosques, and Egypt, just 400 years? Whose to say we don't go the way of other civilizations and die off, dip into dark ages even quicker than these civilizations, all we've got is 400 years of corporation while other civilizations have over 1000 years of non-corporations. Heck, we could end up like a myth like Atlantis.
And the worldwide spread and apparent stickiness of Western technology seems to me a lucky for Europeans, sucks for the rest of world happenstance of world development. China had sailed the world, and Egypt likely traded with Americas but Europe inherited the worlds ancient technology just as population was really jumping off, and combine that technology and with a imperial zeal and greedy culture and a church that wanted convert others...voila...once what eventually became called Western technology got around the world even before corporations were formed.
Seems to me actually, corporations likely made the wiping out of most of the knowledge of the Americas more surgically efficient. So, I guess you could argue, America did lose knowledge due to lack of corporations, maybe their technology to hew perfect fitting stones with drainage systems that still work after they have been through earthquakes and have been abandoned for 500 years would still be around if they had incorporated, instead of being taken out by disease and genocide.
If you put this thought about corporations in proper perspective, it may be interesting insight, but from my view, it is limited way to view development of the world.
If you mean the gigantic, soulless, countryless, profit-above-all-else, government-manipulating, legal-system-abusing, multinational corporations that exist today, then you're dead wrong; they have only hurt civilization.
Entrepreneurs and small businesses coupled with the free market have been the driver of civilization, not gigantic corporations. Look at Gutenberg and the printing press. That was entirely an entrepreneur with a clever idea, who started a small business in order to make a small profit and do something useful. Look at the American Revolution -- not one of the Founding Fathers was a member of a corporation. But many were small business owners! Ben Franklin the printer, Paul Revere the silversmith, etc etc. Washington and Jefferson were plantation owners, the equivalent of running a small to medium size business today.
It took men who were accustomed to being their own boss to create the American Revolution and the great country the US used to be. Now everyone puts on their tie (slave collar) in the morning and goes to work for the giant multinational. Even farming is being done by giant corporations, and farmers have become like factory workers.
Your recapture in a few well-chosen words the spirit that made America great and the false prosperity and political control that is now destroying her is the best that I have ever read. Thank you.
Agreed. We need individual producers to drive civilization again.
thanks, great post...
the fight against crony, crown, big businesses as a big part of American revolution is lost/ignored, and the plenty of Americas, due to thriving "small businesses" the craft worker, the farmer, local merchant etc..the American colonies and then early U.S. thrived, in the north, because it had these types of folks were in stark contrast to the peasants, servants, and workers of Europe...of course Southern US still had this in form African slaves, but as you point out, even the slave owner was a much small, distributed entity than insider big businesses/royalty.
It was America’s climate, her fertile ground for individual success, which built her corporations. Can you imagine Henry Ford starting up in France and going for broke? He only had a chance in America. (Read Ruth Wilder Lane’s illustration in The Discovery of Freedom of the waste of human energy in planned economies by the mere purchase of a spool of thread in a French department store in the 1940s.)
The whole success of International Harvester, say, was based on Cyrus McCormick’s chance to be wealthy as an individual. He didn’t get a group of Goldman and JPM financiers together to built up a corporation. The same with, say, J.C. Penney. They built up their corporations based upon the advantages of free enterprise, of a system that works for individuals by ownership of capital goods and investments that are determined by private decision rather than by state control. The American Dream was about individualism without interference from others. The heart of the Dream is freedom.
Today, there’s much about corporations that is corrupt, unjust and domineering. MicroSoft has made tremendous contributions to the computer industry…but it also has done tremendous damage to America—by off-shoring her jobs to low wage nations, by in-sourcing lower-wage foreign competition, by "shutting off the air supply" of decent and legitimate competitors… And look at the sad story of the development of America’s railroads and the massive state investment and government land grants secured for railroad building by magnates such as LelandStanford, enabling them to live lavish lives.
It’s government capitalism—whereby oligarchs partner with the government in ownership of the means of production.
It means that Bill Gates doesn’t run MicroSoft by himself; he owns it with the U.S. Congress running interference for him, providing him with seed money, legislation for H-1B and L-1 worker visas, off-shore tax havens, special privilege… In short, Gates doesn’t have his multi-billion dollar monopoly growth without the U.S. government’s protection, and that includes U.S. military protection around the globe.
The Founding Fathers gave America her key to success and inventiveness when they included in the United States Constitution a provision for patents. America’s unique and superior patent system gave men the incentive to burn the midnight oil for a chance to own a property right in their own invention. That is the fountainhead of America’s progress and her corporations.
It was the offshoring of the fruits of America's patents to China by America’s government-partnered capitalists as she opened her communist doors to Western capitalism that enabled industrial growth in that nation. And by 2006, the U.S. Patent Office had placed 1,271,000 patent applications on the internet, creating a gold mine for China to steal U.S. innovations and get to market quickly.
Corporations are no longer needed in the form that exists today. They are bad for society. . . Too big and bloated to do anyone but their shareholders (sometimes) any good. I agree.
It was America’s climate, her fertile ground for individual success, which built her corporations. Can you imagine Henry Ford starting up in France and going for broke?
Typical American-centric bullshit. Why don't you read some history about James Watt and Matthew Boulton, or Jacquard's loom before you spout such ignoranct nonsense?
The Founding Fathers gave America her key to success and inventiveness when they included in the United States Constitution a provision for patents. America’s unique and superior patent system gave men the incentive to burn the midnight oil for a chance to own a property right in their own invention. That is the fountainhead of America’s progress and her corporations.
Again, more moronic nonsense. The English with their Statute of Monopolies codified a haphazard system of patents, and these were later improved and restricted under Queen Anne - some 70 years before the US Constitution, you uneducated buffoon - and most scholars assume the US system of patents was based on the English model.
I like and respect America, but I can't stand these idiots who know no history and think the world starts and ends with America. It didn't, it doesn't, and it never will. Dolt.
In 1997, a study of the inventors honored in the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio, revealed that 91% of the world’s greatest inventors worked in America and only 9% in other countries. This is a direct result of the Founders’ provision in the United States Constitution “to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”
It also is a result, as Rose Wilder Lane pointed out in 1943, of “the plain fact that human energy operates more effectively in these United States than it has ever operated before, and more effectively than it operates today anywhere else on this planet.
“Not raw materials, but the uses that human energy makes of raw materials, create this rich new world,” says Lane. That’s what happens when human energy is controlled, not by the State, but by the free individual in pursuit of own own happiness (property) and protected by a representative government.
Now, of course, America has and is being deliberately stripped of her manufacturing base and, thus, her purchasing power by transnational corporations in their quest for huge profits, while using her as the major dumping ground for their global economy as long as her diminishing consumer base lasts.
Wrote Lane in 1943 in The Discovery of Freedom: Man’s Struggle Against Authority, “In less than one century, human energy—only in these States and on the western rim of Europe—has made such a terrific attack on the enemies of human life that it has created the whole modern world.”
That modern world, of course, is quickly being sent back to the Dark Ages as Obama and his administration, partnering with Red China, death march this once great nation down the highway to serfdom with their Stalinesque central planning under the banner of Socialism.
Interesting food for thought, but no buy. The author sees corporations due to their once-cast-in-stone structural asset as the basis of knowledge preservation and thus development of humanity. But the same could be said about big societies in general - whenever people gather in groups of interest and socialize the knowledge will be passed from the source to most of the people in the group. Corporations is just one of those groups.
OTOH a corporation can lose it's structural asset due to a few key people in the management walking out (the managers in question being actual entrepreneurs and not some McDaddy in a managerial seat). So the corporation is not immune to the plague the author speaks of.
Therefore please spare us Part II, which I presume is titled "Corporations - they are good for us".
I haven't read all the comments yet, so I may be repeating this but really: any student of Macluhan would tell you the real change was the development of movable type. Prior to Gutenberg, there weren't many books around; in most places in Europe, they were tightly held by the Church. Copied by hand and/or block press, only a few pages could be produced each day. After Gutenberg, presses could produce over 3,000 pages per day.
Books, and literacy, exploded. By 1500 - about 50 years after Gutenberg - it's estimated that there 20 million books in Europe. Suddenly, a cheap, widely available method to share and spread information existed, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Newton and Liebniz, for example, were able to study the work of other scientists and scholars. This is one of the reasons that the period of 1620 to 1680 was one of the most prolific in terms of scientific achievement (as described in Neal Stephenson's System of the World trilogy). For example, Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle were the first to verify some amateur scientists' ideas about gas pressure, temperature, and volume. They were published in 1662, and Newton referred to their work later. Doubtless, some of this work was told to Savery and Newcomen, who used the concepts to develop the first steam engines. Those engines allowed the development of deeper coal mines faster, and when Watt developed his double-acting engine, the industrial revolution was truly born.
So it was the preservation, and more important, the dissemination of information via information technology, and not corporations that resulted in the tremendous growth we've seen since Elizabethan times. This is not to say the development of corporations was not without benefits; the ability to pool risk and diversify profits was certainly an important addition. But information technology was the key driver spreading information, increasing literacy and numeracy, and creating the amazing civilization we have today.
Tyler, you broke my hart by raping history in the way you just did man...
You can't put 1700 years of history from different civilizations on 1 page. Don't even try to. There are children and morrons that read this also you know and they will think this is how history got together.
I would love to agree with the author...IF i had not seen the following paragraph. Agreed it is a bit conspiratorial...but...what can i say?
'These came to be called the AndrrAka - meaning Those Who Go Passionately Into Darkness. These call themselves The Corporation, meaning ‘of one body’. On Terra ( earth) they distinguished themselves as the Assembly of the Only True God.'
government, corporations and churches= axis of evil George, where are WMDs ? We know you are hiding them!
Corporations and Fascists get along great.
Corporations and Democracies don't get along well at all.
Corporations are like Rottweilers....great pets in the hands of a competent master, but an absolute terror when they're let off the leash.
Corporations always claim 'well of course regulations are needed' and then spend ludicrous amounts of money to make sure every regulation that could constrain them is watered down to the point of insignificance. So how can they ever be trusted?
Ok, i've decided i can't put it off any longer - here it is ...
Scary DOW monthly chart.
http://stockmarket618.wordpress.com
Ok, i've decided i can't put it off any longer - here it is ...
Scary DOW monthly chart.
http://stockmarket618.wordpress.com
Grand's spam bot must be broken. I've never seen it do a double post before...
Negative
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MJju0hWno0
Tripe.
I wonder if I missed it or what, but the "ends" or finality of a corporation shouldn't be "profit"? That's the big difference with the state at least. I was amazed not finding a word about this in the article.
I don't think this view takes into account the negative impact of the Corporation.
With the economic advantages comes moral disadvantages. A typical Corporation
functions on the level of a psychopath. That is an immortal one. The direct and indirect
environmental damage that may make the world nearly uninhabitable will make the Corporate
experiment one of history's greatest failures.
I think the writer overestimates the positive contribution of the Catholic Church. A great deal
of knowledge was preserved by the Muslim world at a time when they were actually progressive.
There are certainly a lot of details like that to take into consideration. windows vps | cheap vps | cheap hosting | forex vps