corporate vs. state, TD's education

[Harmon Seaver]

On Thu, Mar 25, 2004 at 02:02:25PM -0500, Tyler Durden wrote:
> 
> >Get this through your head: a corporation can't initiate force against
> >you.
> >You may not like their product, practices, or price, but no one is
> >coercing you at gunpoint.
> 
> Think I'm gonna have to disagree with ya' hear partner.
> For one, in the old days Corporations regularly hired goons to mow down 
> striking coalminers and whatnot.
> 
   That's for sure -- you should read the history of the strike back around the
early 1900's on Minnesota's Iron Range. The goons would surround a whole small
town, then go from house to house beating *everyone*, even children, with
axehandles. Killed a lot of people too. 


> OK, those days are all gone, right? Wrong. Halliburton and Bechtel have 
> both hired mercs for their Iraq operations. (In fact, I was on a call a 
> couple of weeks ago where a Halliburton official was describing the 
> casualties they take on a regular basis. These don't get reported much in 
> the news, though, for obvious reason...)
> 
   Not to mention all the goons they still hire all over the 3rd world to break
strikes, kill organizers and labor leaders, etc. 


> However, a corporation doesn't actually have to hire the goons these days 
> in order to get the job done, not when it's much cheaper to call upon the 
> publically-available pool of goons that function as a government in some 
> places. The fact that some corporations may leverage existing thuggery to 
> get their job done doesn't make them any less complicit. But this is all 
> besides my main point...
> 
> 
> >PS: you are a corporation, I am a corporation, together we could
> >be a corporation, with 100K others we could be too.  Doesn't
> >matter; all have the same rights to act, and be left alone.

   Nonsense -- corporations are not humans, they have zero rights. Together we
could be a partnership, with 100K others we could be a partnership as
well. Corporations where the owners (shareholders) and employees are not liable
for the crimes and debts of the corp should be illegal. And there's nothing at
all socialistic or statist about that -- in fact, it's more that corporations
require statism to even exiest. 
   

> 
> Well, this is where I suspect a little knee-jerk. I'm no socialist: in no 
> way am I saying that "Corporations are inherently evil". (In fact, I'm 
> hoping to continue profiting admirably as the result of my participation in 
> the capitalist system.) What I think bares investigation is whether or not, 
> here in the US, a subset of the big corporations are so tied in with the 
> political engine as to be complicit in the violations we both agree are 
> occurring.
> 
> As Max said so eloquently, this is not to imply that "we should make some 
> laws and eliminate these big evil corporations". Or maybe it is (I 

    Why not? If Thomas Jefferson and George Washington had their way,
corporations would be illegal in the US. 



-- 
Harmon Seaver	
CyberShamanix
http://www.cybershamanix.com