Corporations are Children

People often like to ask what has been the biggest change of opinion you've had on a major topic. For myself, after coming to accept that hotdogs are in fact sandwiches, I would say my biggest shift is in how I regard corporations. 

I used to be sold on corporations as private businesses. But really, corporations are government creations. I knew this for a long time before I eventually understood it. If government is prone to treating adults like children, it is equally prone to treating corporations like adults. But really, corporations are the children of government.

This new understanding didn't turn me anti-corporate, and I certainly don't want to do away with corporations. Their benefits are indisputable, especially the liability protections they provide to individuals who create jobs and provide goods and services that make society function. Still, while men may be endowed by their creator with unalienable rights, that same Creator did not create corporations. 

I realized that incorporation is a privilege, even if it is a widely granted one. (Even I held an LLC, once.) As such, a corporation has strings attached. A sole proprietor has unlimited liability. Personal assets including home, cars, and bank accounts can be seized to cover lawsuits or bankruptcy. That's the trade-off to the breadth of freedom a sole proprietor enjoys. By contrast, a corporation shields owners from these risks in exchange for, essentially, a pile of paperwork and an ongoing fee.

When I pondered this privilege and the strings attached, I could find nothing wrong in principle with tugging on those strings. If the government is going to grant special immunities to a business, the least that business can do in return is to honor the rights of that government's citizens. Perhaps conservatives are reluctant to tug those strings because they fear a slippery slope into fascistic economic meddling. That's conservatism in a nutshell, I suppose.

Liberals have no such fear. They fought tooth and nail against Citizens United, then upon losing, they immediately adapted to the new rules. They had no principled objection to stop them. If corporations can spend unlimited funds on elections, then by golly, Democrats are going to take over corporations. Now look around. The corporate world has become heavily politicized to the left. Some observers are calling it an oligarchy, and I can't say they are wrong. 

So, I reiterate, corporations are not private businesses. The Right needs a fundamental paradigm shift in this regard. Corporations are public concerns by the very nature of their inception. What we think of as a corporation's "rights" are in fact privileges. Privileges that, if not managed responsibly, should draw consequences. That is exactly how the Left see it! 

I don't have any specific proposals, but I do know Republicans can't hope to outflank Democrats if they're not even fighting on the same battlefield. Gladly, the GOP is waking up to this same idea. Republicans in Georgia and Texas have expressed willingness to retaliate against corporations that take political action against their states. 

Russ Vought, former OMB director, expressed the new mood well, “Boycotts may or may not work, but what will work is to identify every unique benefit these woke companies get under the law and remove them and require they operate as all other companies in those states have to.” 

Something is fundamentally wrong when corporations can attack the very entities responsible for their being without the slightest hint of existential crisis. When they behave like children, they need to be brought in line like children. If they want to smash their toys, then the toys should be taken away.