Corporate Personhood

...really, how little this is brought up in Libertarian circles, and how many people think that a legal (AKA government-defined) entity such as a corporation can have anything to do with a free market. The modern corporations become natural monopolies, the largest always capable of crushing smaller competition, either with underpricing, repeated frivolous lawsuits, or government partnerships imposing regulations that a business without considerable capital already in place cannot comply with.

In a truly free market system, where it was recognized that only living humans have rights, all businesses with multiple owners would actually be contract-bound cooperatives, with all assets owned by individual people and all employess employed by individual people. Any lawsuit against the company would be directly against the contract-bound owners.

You declare your own independence. Watch how your name is layed out in front of you. If it's all in CAPS. you are a United States citizen (notice the lower case "c") But if it's your birth name John Doe Then you are a Citizen of the United States and are not subjected to the "jurisdiction thereof" and owe no allegiance to the U.S. government, they owe their allegiance to YOU!

another link with some history...maybe, after all its the internet.

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/030919.html

What to do about it? Man, thats a tough one. Its so imbedded in our capitalist culture and legal system.

Big predators breed more defenses. As government grows, so do corporations, but it goes back to the growth of voters' powers.

Voters decide they don't want to be taxpayers, so they vote to tax business, business lobbies congress and gets protection, corporations thrive compared to regular companies and get bigger, voters try to tax them more, they lobby Congress more, government gets bigger as we keep asking them to do it, and the corporations keep getting bigger, in part, because they have to have a legal department to deal with government regulation, and a government affairs department to try and influence it, and the ones who don't have that fail or get bought out.

Phew! This is why when you fight for your own rights, you must fight for the rights of others as well. You can't just vote to make others pay. It has unintended consquences.

Ecosystems exist in few places that don't have big predators. In those places, the rest of the population needs few defences.

IMissLiberty