beyond incorporation

BEYOND CORPORATE GOVERNMENT
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com
July 4, 2011
Adam Smith wrote in 1776 that corporate charters were the enemy of “the invisible hand” that makes economies work for people. Governments give corporate investors limits on their liability. You can be a shareholder from the other side of the planet who can only lose what s/he gambles on how much s/he can profit from doing business with strangers. Smith argued that corporate charters like this should only be granted for limited public purposes. The privilege of limiting liability (aka incorporation) should only be granted to foreign for-profit investors should be limited to those few businesses which demonstrated they were vital to collective (national?) security.
Now worldwide government services are under attack. Privatize is the slogan for economic welfare. Unless Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations 1776 economic bible of liberal economics is all wrong, any bank or financier whose debt gets financed, any US corporate charter in any state ought to be subject to revocation for putting absentee profit ahead of the public purpose any grant of incorporation in any state is legally obliged to serve.
To my inhabitants of the US particularly (maybe Greece too), if you think government is bad, privatization is much worse, so less publicly responsible and open. Let’s call for-profit corporations to account and not allow their money to corrupt our governments. Love and peace--hal