FM Corporations/ businesses/ entitities

[Sean Lynch]

On Fri, Jul 29, 2016 at 6:51 PM Zenaan Harkness <zen at freedbms.net> wrote:

> On Fri, Jul 29, 2016 at 09:45:40PM -0300, juan wrote:
> > On Fri, 29 Jul 2016 13:43:12 +0300
> > Georgi Guninski <guninski at guninski.com> wrote:
> > > Anyway, I meant that in a free market (FM), you will still have
> > > corporations (possibly under more politically correct term like FM
> > > corporation).
> >
> >       'corporations' are a legal fiction created by the state, so no.
>
> When > 1 humans associate for the purposes of shared economic activity/
> incentive in what we may as well term "business", it is in their
> interests to face the world as a named entity.
>

Agreed.


> I think this is Georgi's point - in a FM we are free to associate with
> one another as we so choose. So in Georgi's case here,
>
>  FM corporation ~= business ~= economic activity association
>
> And of course, where there is no government, there shall be no
> "corporations" as created by governments. Any group calling themselves a
> "corporation" would have a meaning different from the current meaning,
> thus "FM corporation".
>

Even without a government, I think an anarchic society will still need
institutions to function, even if those institutions are entirely
voluntary. I can imagine sets of institutions that would allow corporations
in a similar sense to how they exist now, i.e. limited liability and some
form of "personhood." The most likely such institution would be some kind
of court system where, in order to have access to the court as a means of
seeking restitution, you must agree not to go outside it to go after any
other participant, and must not have done so before.


> This leads to perhaps an interesting question:
>
> Today there are many businesses, companies, corporations etc. which
> entities represent their owners (possibly in the form of share holders)
> and controllers (possibly just the owners, and/ or part owners, or the
> directors/ managers employed to control certains aspects of the
> business).
>
> Share holders/ owners can include other entities - trusts, hedge funds,
> pension funds etc.
>
> These entity owners have actual interests - economic interests, and any
> other contractable/ name-able interest which might be written, but may
> not be written, including for example:
>  - simple economic interests - share dividends, perceived future share
>    price for future sale etc
>  - maturity of an estate, vesting from the estate holder to the named
>    beneficiaries in a will
>  - power and control structures as manifested by the CIA, FBI, NSA,
>    North American BISMIC (banking intelligence surveillance/ spying
>    military industrial control complex)
>
> Contracts (explicit/ implied) - entities - interests (or rather
> "beneficiaries").
>
> (Of course some interests would not be considered "lawful" or acceptable
> to an average direct democracy/ anarchic voter (assuming that particular
> interest were up for a vote) for example.)
>
> THE QUESTION:
> The question I think always shall be, is how to transition to an
> anarchic society, in consideration of existing interests. I.e. how to
> peacefully transition existing entities/ structure/ interests into an
> anarchistic/ truly free market reality.
>

This is a question I think about all the time.


> I am implying evolution. Revolution - we see how well that went after
> the fall of the Tzar, to the various CIA instigated revolutionary coups
> from Lybia to Syria, Ukraine to Yugoslavia, none of which resulted in
> nor were intended to result in an actualisation of an anarchistic
> society.
>

Agreed.


> The problem with revolution, is that it is ideological extremists who
> give enough of a shit to pick up a gun and start shooting (for example)
> police, citizens and government officials, and the outcome is that the
> ideological extremists end up holding the seats of power and institute
> something -other- than anarchism. Such extremists as our world's history
> have seen, tend to sociopathy, rather than the benevolent, side of
> dictatorship.
>

I see revolutions as a symptom of a broken society. Reform, or evolution,
is certainly preferable.


>
> We must always remember it is never the arm chair pundit ("oh I wish our
> democracy elected representatives actually represented us") crowd who
> will change the world.
>
> So historically, revolutions seem to be more a devolution than an
> evolution of the status quo. If you have counter examples, please
> highlight them now.
>

The French and English revolutions both resulted, after a while, in better
societies than they started in, as far as I can tell. The Haitian
revolution ended slavery there. I don't consider the American revolution,
on the other hand, to be a counter example, though it clearly inspired the
French revolution. Not to say that the French revolution and other reforms
of European monarchies wouldn't have happened anyway.


> So it is that I hold far greater hope for a better/ anarchistic/ direct
> democracy type of future, via the pathway of evolution, and not
> revolution.
>

Same here.


> And so it is also that we owe it to our future generations to consider
> pathways to peaceful transition of existing interests, into that better
> future.
>

Agreed.

While I think agorism's approach ("grow the counter-economy and the state
will eventually whither away") is provably ineffective, I do think it has a
lot to teach us here. Its main problem is that government is always "just
good enough" that people will continue to resort to it, and people are
forced to pay for it whether or not they make use of it, and they may not
opt out of its jurisdiction. One must not only create alternatives to
government services, they must be alternatives people actually use.

One of the pieces of evidence used against Ross Ulbricht was a post of his
in which he stated, "I am creating an economic simulation to give people a
first-hand experience of what it would be like to live in a world without
the systemic use of force." Whether or not Silk Road was that "simulation",
the general statement is exactly what we need to do, in my opinion. Create
systems of "law" and "governance" that do not require the use of force.
These systems do not have to be all-encompassing; they can be small and
narrow in scope. They just have to make it so people don't feel like they
have to resort to government (i.e. force) to achieve their ends.

Just like they do with the "wild west", I think people drastically
underestimate the amount of spontaneous order in black markets. Hollywood
certainly feeds of it with post-apocalyptic movies & TV shows that depict
everything going straight to "anarchy" the moment there's a hiccup in
government. But history demonstrates that in fact the exact opposite is
true. The only time things descend into "anarchy" when the government falls
is when the collapse of the government was caused by violence in the first
place, or where the government's failure had left society "hollowed out."
Somalia is probably the best known example of this happening. I think
Russia after the collapse of the USSR is probably a more typical example of
what I believe to be the common case.

Security of property and computer systems is an area that's pretty ripe for
non-government solutions. I doubt most readers of this list assume that
they can just rely on police to prevent their car from getting stolen or
house from getting broken into, or think the police will come along and
investigate after the fact, then catch the thief and get their stuff back.
No, we all have insurance, locks, good passwords with two-factor and/or
public key authentication, probably cameras, safes, crypto, etc. A lot of
that is pretty hard to use, though, so maybe we should be focusing on
making the solutions we use available to the masses.

Thanks for this post, by the way. One of my favorites on cpunks to date.
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