There is a dangerous fiction that we use to raise money for enterprises that require large amounts of capital. This fiction is the corporation. Our laws create corporations and give them astounding legal rights. Corporations raise ten of billions, even hundreds of billions of dollars. The danger comes when we allow corporations to seek profit by any means available to them.
In its early days, America rightly feared corporate greed. For example, during the Boston Tea Party, the colonists dumped the tea of the British East India Tea Company into the Boston Harbor. In part, the company angered the colonists because the British government had granted it a monopoly on the tea trade. The British East India Tea Company, a true corporate giant, ruled India.
Because the corporate model provides such an efficient mechanism for raising capital, the various states of the United States of America charter corporations. So the danger posed by corporate greed remains with us. Although most of America’s corporate giants are good citizens, the profit motive remains and so does human greed. Thus we must watch these sometimes amoral monsters carefully. Although our forebears solved the tea problem, new challenges arise constantly. The latest comes the use of the Internet and the ease with which it allows the invasion of our privacy rights. For details, see this post at Two Conservatives.
