> Visions of faceless large corporations or even HAL controlling a small town are frightening and the stuff of science fiction.
Company towns are well-recorded history, not science fiction. Lost Hills California (home of Wonderful Pistachios) exists in the real, present, non-fictional world.
That does not make it not frightening nor not the stuff of science fiction. We know how awful corporate towns are that’s partly why cyberpunk is what it is.
There’s really nothing inherently profane about the concept, it’s just often abused. I’d love to see a few working examples out in the real world, personally.
> There’s really nothing inherently profane about the concept, it’s just often abused.
The same thing can be said about any autocratic government, but the practical and documented historical issues are why they are not liked. Just as dictatorship works well when you have a good ruler who cares about the people, the issue isn't if you get a bad ruler, but when.
The same can be said about literally anything in existence, from this incredibly inane point of view. Lots of things are historically dangerous and only work well when people who don't suck is running it.
Most things suck when someone shitty is running it. This is the worst argument of all time. There's really no reason, based on the very bad argument you've presented here, to assume a local, state, or federal government would be any better than any corporation. Please, I beg of you, come up with some argument that takes more than two seconds to disregard.
> Most things suck when someone shitty is running it. This is the worst argument of all time.
I actually think it is the only argument.
As Churchill mused:
"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…"
Company towns, communism, etc are bad specifically because of their ease of abuse, which is why our best (least worst) systems of governing are focused on transparency, accountability and minimizing abuse. It sucks that all that friction makes it less efficient, but alas we need to plan for the/humanities worst, because it continually crops up.
> Lots of things are historically dangerous and only work well when people who don't suck is running it.
Authoritarian dictatorships always have people who sux on top. They are created by people who sux in the forst place and there is only a little to make them accountable.
And incentives placed on rules and their underlings ensure they will sux even when they did not originally.
Pullman, IL was the model of a company town and started off as a reasonable (if paternalistic) approach to providing good housing and services to your employees.
It's specifically about corporations that own property in a specific town voting. So no you can't just spin up a bunch of LLCs to rig an election, this is about the rights of absentee landlords.
What is the smallest subplot you can split a parcel into?
And are we talking literally land, or would condo ownership suffice? (After all, you typically stack a few condos on top of one parcel of land). The smallest condo is probably dictated by some pesky human habitability rules, but what class of property has the fewest minimum-square-footage zoning rules? Retail probably has egress rules, but what about industrial spaces?
Could you create an industrial park to house a bunch of, to use a rough metaphor, independently-owned/independently-operated phone booths (or whatever other "qualifying use")?
Basically is there a category of land-use you could split ownership off at ridiculous scale, offer LLC-as-a-service to buy a bunch of them, and just for fun, tokenize the votes to provably aggregate the absentee ballots at scale via blockchain?
If it's one-entity-one-vote, what is the most cost-effective way to maximize the number of qualifying entities?
Bonus points for every order of magnitude of synthetic votes you can reasonably achieve over the fleshy variety.
In most areas, especially any that are at all developed, land parcels and minimum lot sizes are under the control of a county or city commission, council, board, etc. Subdividing a property is as expensive and time consuming as you might imagine dealing with the government, you'll probably need a lawyer to do it properly, have to appear before at at least one if not several public meetings or hearings, etc. And they will almost certainly deny any petition along the lines of the examples you offered.
Where I am, things like dividing a 5 acre rural property so that a mother-in-law can live in a cottage near her family are routinely denied.
You mean under the control of the commissions, councils, boards, etc that are being elected in these very elections? Elections in which many actual humans may not be paying attention to positions on "arcane" land use rules, but the non-human legal entities in question (or their managers) will be?
>under the control of the commissions, councils, boards, etc
Let me save you some words.
Next time just call them "the local real estate developer slime balls" because that's who makes up the vase majority of these organizations. Like maybe a particularly upstanding town might have a local banker or lawyer on one of the boards or something.
These are not democratic institutions. They are business groups that happen to be part of government.
These organizations are already in the pocket of business interests. If anything this change is destabilizing because it now means that the PE owned car-wash and the company that owns a bunch of chain franchise businesses in the town as well as every local business that owns land or the landlords thereof but is owned by people who live in the surrounding towns can push back and say "screw you, we're not all willing to bend over and take it so you can make another buck developing another street of McMansions".
Letting megacorps vote is probably bad. But I think we should see where this goes. There's a lot of "enemy of my enemy" potential here for the currently disenfrachinsed business interests to push back on the business interests that are in bed with government to the benifit of the people. Enemy of my enemy is my ally and all that.
> What is the smallest subplot you can split a parcel into?
An acre, here. See your local zoning code or land statutes for minimum lot sizes. Consult agreements that run with the land for additional restrictions.
Why not? Isn't it fundamentally the same idea as apartment complex tenets getting votes? Why couldn't a business sell off lockers to companies giving them voting access? Walk in Closets? Very small room apartments? What's the minimum size of real-estate needed?
Except if I really wanted to be an awful human being, I'd just buy property, subdivide it, and then multiply my votes in the town election by the number of property units I've individually sold to my various LLCs.
This is kind of a violation of the "one man one vote" ideal that is the bedrock of our society. It easily turns in to "money buys influence" which is exactly the opposite of what made the US a great country to live in. If you don't understand that and you're a US Citizen you should really retake the civics / political science classes from high school.
I find myself defending this shitty ruling (which I honestly think is bad, but bad for completely other reasons) the ruling basically says, since corporations are not using this to dilute the vote it's fine, which basically means in other words, if corporations where to do the shenanigans you're suggesting, the judge is open to revising the ruling.
Yes, you can. The county does not appear to be registered land (Torrens title) where the Registry would have some say in whether a transfer is valid. So you can straightforwardly hire a surveyor to draw up a plot plan with many square foot chunks, and then execute and record a different deed for each of them.
My point was that the laws regarding those minimum lot sizes are about buildable lots. Although now that I'm looking into this I think the snag would be trying to record that plot plan, where the Registry would be mechanically looking for a town approval stamp on the plan before they were willing to record it.
But a new avenue has occurred to me that actually saves money on deed costs - nothing prevents multiple corporate entities from jointly owning a piece of real estate on one deed, right? So you could conceivably create one Delaware Series LLC, create an unlimited number of distinct legal entities with that, and then write one deed that lists all of those entities as joint owners of the single piece of real estate. Basically similar to multiple residents living in one house, and each getting a vote (but applied to infinitely scalable corporate entities!)
The fundamental flaw here is the law framing the entity itself as having voting rights (also why this attracts so much attention!), whereas if it were framed such that every beneficial owner with over say 35% of the ownership interest could vote, that would be intrinsically limiting.
This idea is equally wrong for different reasons, but I do have a measure of appreciation for you having abandoned your first intrinsically broken idea upon the first resistance you encountered. Fail fast!
Why would thirty companies that owned a company together get one vote each instead of one thirtieth? The thirty companies would each have one vote in determining how to vote the one parent's vote.
(You are, however, correct to note that you can record absolute gibberish if you want to, so long as you pay the recorder. This does not effectuate a transfer of land, though; it merely serves as constructive notice to the person who is bound to look for such recorded notice, i.e., the beneficial purchaser for value. In a way, you could think of the function of a recorder as preventer of race conditions, not the database).
Well the choice was either accept the likelihood of a common restriction that seems to exist in many places, or dig into the actual specifics of the law in this Delaware county. I don't need to give myself a headache for fun.
Why would thirty companies each get a vote? Because that is what the charter says. There wouldn't be one parent company, rather the real estate would be owned by them all directly as tenants in common.
> 9. A. (2) Non-residents. Every property owner as of March 1 prior to the annual municipal election, whether a natural person or artificial entity, including but not limited to corporations, partnerships, trusts, and limited liability companies, and who is registered to vote, if provided by ordinance, shall have one (1) vote. A natural person shall be a citizen of the United States and age 18 on or before the date of the election. An artificial entity shall be a domestic entity in the State of Delaware.
So they must be Delaware entities. Another thing I'm giving up on is that the Series LLC might not work. While each Series is legally independent from the others, I think they still might not be considered distinct "entities" (once again, not looking to give myself a headache to solidly determine that).
So either do one LLC/corporation per vote, or perhaps trusts might be even cheaper (no idea what filing/recording would be required for trusts, especially to substantiate them enough to register to vote)
For now. Corporations rule the world, and there's nothing that a few bribes here and there can't fix. Hell, they've gotten the right to vote, in spite of all common sense and constitutional arguments. What makes you think they won't be able to go all the way and take over the entire democratic process?
say I partitipate in .. 8 businesses in the district, and all of them are independent corporate entities that own the land they operate on. and each of them has multiple owners. I have some influence in the vote of all of these companies, and maybe we can even assume that most of the owners have similar views on things like property taxes in districts they don't reside in.
There is no right for non-residents of a city to vote in that city elections just because they own property there. Owning that property via a LLC shouldn't change that.
Why can't corporations be toen councilors or mayors in those same towns? A privilege availed to other voters there.
I'm being sarcastic because I don't like it. Corporations are a simulacrum of people, and at best, their personhhood a useful legal fiction under very limited number of scenarios.
> Where a voter is entitled
to vote by virtue of being both a resident and as an owner of real
property, that voter shall be entitled to only one vote; where a voter
is entitled to vote by ownership of two or more parcels of real
property, that voter shall be entitled to only one vote.
> Any legal entity other than a natural person entitled to vote, must
cast its vote by a duly executed and notarized power of attorney from
the legal entity granting the authority to cast its vote to its
designated attorney-in-fact… The person casting the ballot for such
entity shall be age 18 on or before the date of the election and a
citizen of the United States.
Also what constitutes ownership here? Couldn't some Enterprising Individuals open 100 shell companies, pool together resources and form the Legalize Asbestos Consortium, the Consortium buys a plot of land and then each stakeholder of the Consortium counts as an owner of the plot of land?
FWIW, it sounds like the judge may be open to ruling against such an action. From his decision at https://aboutblaw.com/blQg:
> Even if Plaintiff had made a “vote dilution” or “one person/one vote” claim under the Equal Protection Clause, it fails. Plaintiff does not assert facts that would adequately support such a claim. Plaintiff does not allege... that natural person voters are a minority or are politically cohesive [or] that entity property owners vote sufficiently as a bloc to usually defeat the preferred candidates of natural persons.
Although he also notes that the recent Callais case, severely weakening section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, may change this - and, of course, waiting until the Legalize Asbestos Consortium is doing its thing and trying to file a lawsuit is much more complex than preemptively saying "only natural persons can vote."
Oh? Which industry regularly uses this as a part of standard business for consumers? Unless... you're just pretending to be too obtuse to understand the extremely obvious implication here.
What would probably happen is that all the the owners of the property would have to designate one POA among themselves to represent their collective interest in that property.
It does say that multiple owners of a single property can not have their voting rights apportioned by value, as this would be dilution or would not fit one person/one vote.
> I appreciate that Plaintiff may disagree with Delaware’s policy of authorizing certain municipalities to allow voting on behalf of entity property owners. Visions of faceless large corporations or even HAL, 55 controlling a small town are frightening and the stuff of science fiction. However, Plaintiff has not demonstrated that this policy violates the principle of one person/entity/one vote.
It fundamentally violates one person/entity/one vote. Corporations are not sentient. If you let them vote, a person gets to vote twice. There's no way around that conflict. I feel like this has to collapse on appeal or the nation is doomed.
> Where a voter is entitled
to vote by virtue of being both a resident and as an owner of real
property, that voter shall be entitled to only one vote; where a voter
is entitled to vote by ownership of two or more parcels of real
property, that voter shall be entitled to only one vote.
However, that seems to get messy with multi-owner LLCs where you might give 1% of each LLC to a bunch of your buddies and have them each vote as POA for theirs.
If you’re a shareholder in 5 companies, each owning 2 parcels of land, each with their own PoA, and you yourself hold land — then you have “influence” into 6 votes, though only direct ownership of 1 vote
You quoted Fenwick's charter. Where a voter is entitled to vote [in Fenwick] by virtue of being both a resident [in Fenwick] and as an owner of real property [in Fenwick], that voter shall be entitled to only one vote [in Fenwick]; where a voter is entitled to vote [in Fenwick] by ownership of two or more parcels of real property [in Fenwick], that voter shall be entitled to only one vote [in Fenwick]. You dispute this meaning?
The strongest plausible interpretation of josefritzishere and Refreeze5224 was the judge was wrong because voting in 2 places would violate 1 person 1 vote. Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.[1]
This is not what people mean when they say vote in 2 places commonly. And I said 2 cities before.
1 person 1 vote is an expression of equal representation.[1] Someone who votes in city 1 and city 2 and someone who votes in city 1 solely have unequal representation.
besides zoning laws, the judge fairly explicitly states that one of the reasons he thinks it's fine is because corporations aren't doing these kinds of shenanigans, so if you were to do something like that he might revise the ruling.
IANAA. It would seemed to be recorded, not registered, land. Which means I wouldn't think approval would be required in the first place (the lot isn't going to be buildable though, of course]
I own property in a nearby town but it's an investment; I don't live there. I'm unable to vote in their local elections. I have not heard of property ownership being a qualification to vote since the 1800s.
I own property there, I pay property taxes there (at the highest "non-owner-occupied" rate), in my case I'm actively operating a business not (just) a passive investor. Why should I have zero say in how those taxes are spent, or other local governance? I'm not a disinterested bystander.
I pay sales taxes in other cities I travel in, I too should get a say in how they run their government. Money, after all, is the top virtue in a democracy; if it wasn't why did the founders ensure that slavers had equal representation?
> Money, after all, is the top virtue in a democracy
"The Founders" of the US (however you want to form that category) were not the arbiters of what is virtuous about Democracy. Democracy is orthogonal to US law and intent. The PR for the US has always tried to message that they are a singular ethos.
I would say the difference is that as a property owner I have a long-term local presence and vested interest there, I am (in theory) motivated to make thoughtful decisions about local governance, as opposed to a disinterested bystander passing through and paying local sales tax on a soft drink.
My parents own two properties, but they have to decide which one they are residents of, because they are not entitled to a say in how both local governments are run.
If I am a long-term owner of Google stock, I still don't get a say in how Mountain View runs their city. A "vested financial interest" in an area should not be enough to give one a vote on local laws.
I guess the Walton family has a long-term local presence in basically every mid to large town and city in america. Same with Mcdonalds Corp. They have vested interests there (crushing competition, raising prices, lower quality, profit!). And their bigly profits certainly show a more significant vested interest as opposed to just a small property owner or worse a bystander or citizen.
Because you have a vested interest in the success of that region by owning land (and a business) at that location. You have skin in the game compared to someone who is just renting and can easily flee to a different city if they vote poorly.
>renting and can easily flee to a different city if they vote poorly.
Nitpick:
I think you're correct that the problem is people who do selfish shortsighted things and leave others holding the bag but I think you are blaming the wrong people.
Pretty much everyone from Marx to MLK to Rand and Sowell identifies somme sort of class of "comfortable enough to meddle in things to further their self interest at everyone else's detriment" demographics as the root of a whole bunch of bad stuff.
In most municipalities middle class who are too tied into the place (often through home ownership) to just get out that provide the bulk of the political will to do short sighted "feels good" stuff that solves some minor problem they have but screws the whole place on a 20-50yr timeline (by which time the individuals responsible will have retired and cashed out to Idaho or Florida or whatever).
Owning property through a corporation is trivial. 3 of my nearby neighbors are owned via an LLC (rentals).
* Start an LLC/C-corp for a trivial amount of money.
* Purchase land, but instead of paying with it via a personal check, you need a touch of foresight so you can "capitalize" the corporation you just started. Write the check from the corporation, instead of your personal checkbook.
yeah so it sounds like if you did this IN THIS TOWN and didn't also live in the town you'd get a vote. I'm not sure if you'd get a vote if you owned the land directly but for all I know you might.
IANAA, but having looked into it this does very little to actually reduce the liability exposure from small businesses. The minute you do anything yourself, you start to accrue personal liability. The only way to keep the corporate veil intact is to hire other people. So it only works if you're rich enough to hire a management company to do everything (screen tenants, maintenance/inspections, supervise contractors, etc) and you manage it as a purely financial investment. Just like the anonymity aspect doesn't work out in most states unless you're willing to shell out for an attorney to be the manager. In general these laws aren't made to help little people.
I was daydreaming about, picture if a corporation buys an entire state.
Say, Wyoming or West Virginia. Gemini guesses $180 billion to $250 billion.
With that investment, they'd get to control who lives in the state.
So, then the corporation gets to control who the Governor is. And the two Senators, and the seat in the Congress.
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but doesn't a single Senator have just a tremendous amount of power to block basically any legislation? With pocket vetoes, or silent filibusters?
Granted, actually buying a Senator is probably cheaper by a few orders of magnitude.
Look up Vernon CA history. It is pretty much this where there are a couple city owned residential properties, rest of city is nearly purely industrial, and tenancy of these tightly controlled to shape local election outcomes.
FWIW, you have a risk of losing your senator every 6 years, and senators don't have power in local matters.
Plus, the way things are going with conservatives pushing hard for federalism, owning local matters could become more important, anyway. You might be onto something...
I don’t understand why people have so much trouble understanding that a “corporation” is just a proxy for the humans that own and control the corporation. In this case, non-residents who own a house on the island can vote according to the charter. The charter just says that this doesn’t change because you move ownership of the house into a legal entity that some human then owns and controls.
The actual grievance seems to be unrelated to the corporation itself. People just associate “corporations” with rich people, and they won’t want rich people to vote.
I don't think anyone would object to a rich person casting a single vote and maybe putting a bumper sticker on their car or a sign in their yard. The issue people take with the rich and politics is the outsized influence they wield in elections. The whole "one person one vote" thing falls apart when the rich can throw millions at advertisements and millions at the "charities" run by the politicians they bought.
The issue isn't that people are trying to change people's minds. There are two issues here:
First, the rich have unimaginably more power in changing people's minds. This isn't sitting down at a bar and having a chat with hank to try to convince him to vote on prop 99. It is the wealthy putting their opinions on your phone, television, and billboards, reminding you of it multiple times per day. If politics is truly a contest of ideas, then the playing field needs to be level so that the ideas can be evaluated fairly, rather than it simply being a contest of who can buy enough ad space to brainwash people to vote against their interests.
Second, the wealthy don't have to change people's minds. They can purchase politicians by "donating" to them, going to million-dollar-per-plate dinners hosted by them, directly giving them money by staying in their hotels, etc. You don't have to convince a politician that they should vote on prop 99, you just need to pay them however much they want for their vote.
If the wealthy had exactly as much power in politics as a fireman or nurse, then I'd be all for their participation.
> First, the rich have unimaginably more power in changing people's minds
If that was true everyone would love billionaires. I'm fascinated by the cluelessness of this assertion!
The actual research on campaign finance says that once you've managed to inform the voters about what you stand for and who you are, further spending does very little.
> simply being a contest of who can buy enough ad space to brainwash people to vote against their interests
This is the most anti democratic statement I've seen in a while!
If you think voters are such easily brainwashed fools, you can hardly be pro democracy!
Money are not speech. Yes, I know supreme court is openly pro corruption and lawlessness when to comes to their guys. That does not mean I have to buy that sophistry too.
Is this rich person also voting in the place where they actually live? I'm not against a rich person voting, I just don't want them to get more than one vote. I haven't read the opinion to see if that's addressed.
Having grown up in a tourism/2nd home town I think this is probably a good thing. Keeps the place from being totally captured by local business interests.
But it would likely lead to other problems because the owner demographics are generally out of touch.
> Keeps the place from being totally captured by local business interests.
I'm pretty sure this is a fundimental design of the US system. There are things your city is allowed to do by state constitution. Things your county is allowed to do. And things only the state is allowed to do.
This is expressly to enable the people that live in that place the right to self governance.
Does a corporation need healthcare? Can a corporation be jailed? Does a corporation have a finite life in which they can pursue happiness? Does a corporation have offspring it's trying to raise? Does a corporation have hopes and dreams? Does a corporation wish to visit a park or visit with their neighbors? Are you for real?
Replace "corporation" in each of your questions above with "organizational model employed by people as a mechanism for coordinating complex activities", and the answers should all become clear.
Much of the discourse on this topic involves muddled, contradictory thinking that simultaneously argues "corporations aren't people" and "corporations are exercising autonomous agency as singular entities distinct from the people who constitute them". These two premises cannot both be true.
It _seems true_ when the people represented by the organizational model never face consequences for their actions, using the corporation as a liability shield.
So while corporations aren't people, they do seem to be exercising autonomous agency as singular entities distinct from the people who constitute them. Because by definition that is what a limited liability corporation provides? It seems that this is the crux of a lot of angst?
> It _seems true_ when the people represented by the organizational model never face consequences for their actions, using the corporation as a liability shield.
Corporations don't function as a liability shield in the sense you're talking about. The idea that people can individually engage in criminal or tortious conduct without any direct accountability is a myth -- limited liability protects investors from financial liabilities that exceed their investment, but it in no way shields corporate managers from liability for their own criminal conduct in managing the firm.
> So while corporations aren't people, they do seem to be exercising autonomous agency as singular entities distinct from the people who constitute them. Because by definition that is what a limited liability corporation provides?
No, it does not do that in any way, shape or form. Limited liability means that creditors can't foreclose on your house to cover the debts of a firm that you own $100 of stock in. It does not shield anyone actually managing the company from civil or criminal liability for their actions.
> It seems that this is the crux of a lot of angst?
That angst is attributable to believing in misinformation pushed advanced by factions who benefit from increasing conflict and controversy in our society.
So why then does it seem that corporations do in fact shield executives from criminal charges? Is this just collusion among the well-off? Money buys verdicts?
I’m happy to take your word on limited liability as IANAL (obviously) but it sure as hell seems like executives ought to go to jail a LOT more than they do. Corporations do terrible things in the world and are seemingly never held to account.
Finally, looking to my own education, can you suggest a place to read up on this topic so I am not flatly wrong in the future? Thx in advance :)
> So why then does it seem that corporations do in fact shield executives from criminal charges? Is this just collusion among the well-off? Money buys verdicts?
Misinformation, propaganda, urban legends, etc.
> but it sure as hell seems like executives ought to go to jail a LOT more than they do.
Based on what? Which executives are you talking about, and what crimes do you suspect them of?
> Corporations do terrible things in the world and are seemingly never held to account.
Again, what "terrible things" are you talking about, and what level of accountability do you see lacking in the way existing police forces, regulatory agencies, and the courts respond to their behavior?
> Finally, looking to my own education, can you suggest a place to read up on this topic so I am not flatly wrong in the future?
I'd start with any basic intro-level textbook on business law.
Before you start, given the extent to which your previous comments indicate you're relying on how things feel or seem to you, I'd recommend considering the extent to which you are reading your own assumptions and emotional attachments into your perceptions of the outside world, and the extent to which you're relying on echo chambers and biased sources of information to validate your theories and assumptions.
Laymen here: my guess would be that the financial and social resources corporate representatives have access to (both personally and through the entity that has a vested interest in them not going to jail) make the prospect of prosecuting them for criminal misconduct unappetizing. It would be a lot of time and money to send people with a lot of powerful friends to jail for a handful of years, at best. As a prosecutor, what's better for your career: that, or spending significantly fewer resources putting street-level criminals in prison for 5, 10, 20 years?
Before trying to explain why you think business executives aren't being prosecuted for criminal conduct, can you first point to a reliable source of data that indicates that this is actually happening, and isn't just a myth reinforced by online echo chambers?
Anecdotally, most of the large corporate scandals that involved actual criminal conduct that I'm aware of did result in prosecutions and, often, convictions of the culpable parties. For example, Jeffrey Skilling, Bernie Madoff, and Elizabeth Holmes all went to jail.
I should state that this reply is mostly for other people reading our comment thread, as I can think of no adult American who would present your argument in good faith.
Why can't both of those be true? I don't see any contradiction between them. The law doesn't seem to have any issue taking them both as true either. Corporations are considered their own entity under the law, but they do not enjoy all the rights of people. The whole reason this story is making headlines instead of being a humdrum "dog bites man" event is because corporations typically do not have the right to vote, even though people mostly do.
The problem is voting has historically been limited to, real, living things. This has inherently limited the total amount of votes cast and where.
Corporations are an artificial entity that literally anyone can make. Even things like property ownership are somewhat artificial. Lots can generally be split and joined through a process.
This allowance of artificial entities voting seems to open a rabbit hole of secondary issues.
If the corporation is just a proxy for the owners then why is this in court? Why aren't the humans just voting directly? It's well established that it's OK for humans to vote.
The question is, why did they bother to take it to court instead of just transferring ownership directly to their persons and then voting as humans? If corporations are just proxies then why bother with the lawyers and the court fees and the time?
Because they want the other benefits of the corporate form. Why should they have to choose between the benefits of the corporate structure and exercising the rights the municipality has given property owners?
They're not, and the terminology shouldn't be confused. "Juridical people" tries to sneak in priors about what "people" means.
People, of course, have rights. Corporations are not people, including "juridical people". They are legal fiction with absolutely no rights. Every action they take is permission granted to them by the people.
You have it backwards. As you acknowledged elsewhere, "juridical people" is an abstraction over a group of people. To be more precise, a collective acting towards a unified goal (with a set of norms binding them together).
Even the naive perspective over this recognizes that the corporation has "rights" by being proxies of their constituents, so you are correct in saying "Every action they take is permission granted to them by the people."
However, a more careful analysis recognizes that the exercised rights of a corp comes from a combination of the rights of its members, often in intermingled way (due to binding norms of the corp) that doesn't map directly into a singular individual. As such, it's common to abstract it as the "rights of the corporation". You can look at the individual rights (sometimes you have to), but that's like looking at humans by their individual cells. Certainly doable, but cumbersome most of the time.
Also, I find the phrase "They are legal fiction with absolutely no rights" funny. As if rights weren't legal fiction themselves. Not that this means much either, ethics and law are about "what ought to be done", and that's - objectively - as fictional as you can get.
You're confusing them again, which is why sneaking in priors with the term "people" is bad. "granted to them by the people" means "We The People", society, etc, not the people in control of the legal fiction.
> being proxies of their constituents
These proxies have no rights. People can exercise their rights as people. Or, they can create legal fictions with no rights. That legal fiction inherits no rights from the owners, which is where the analogy fails. There's no intermingling/combination/whatever to call "rights", because there's nothing.
Every action that legal fiction takes is a permission granted to it by society that continues to tolerate its existence. That tolerance is finite. When that tolerance ends, so does the legal fiction's existence. Unlike with people, there are no moral quandaries with revoking the privilege of existence.
Rights being inherent to people is an interesting but separate topic. We've generally agreed as a society that people have rights.
> People can exercise their rights as people. Or, they can create legal fictions with no rights.
How exactly do you think they can create these legal fictions? Through their rights. That's how corporations inherit them. Keep in mind I'm not focusing on LLCs, but the more broader concept, that also includes an organized society under a common set of rules.
> There's no intermingling/combination/whatever to call "rights", because there's nothing.
There's clearly something, as "Microsoft" and "Google" are distinct entities. To imply there's nothing is to imply there's no difference.
> Every action that legal fiction takes is a permission granted to it by society that continues to tolerate its existence.
Who is "society" here? Everyone? Clearly not, or else this trial would not have reached this conclusion while others complain in the internet about its results. Generally, it refers to a group of people bound by a set of rules (the constituion, laws, etc.), i.e. a corporation. So it's a bit funny that a legal fiction decides whether other legal fictions exist.
> Rights being inherent to people is an interesting but separate topic.
We are in a discussion about whether corporations have rights or not. It ultimately will touch on the source of rights and where they are derived from.
> We've generally agreed as a society that people have rights.
Which doesn't do much against rights being legal fiction. Or corporations having rights.
I'm also focused on the broader principle, not just specifically any one structure such as LLCs.
I have the legal right as a person to write on a piece of paper "i am a person". That piece of paper does not inherit any rights by my doing so.
Me writing "Microsoft" on one paper and "Google" on another paper certainly means that those two pieces of paper are distinct. Neither one, however, has rights.
What I meant by intermingling/combination/whatever is that, there are no rights to inherit, because a piece of paper has no rights, inherited or otherwise. That includes intermingled rights of people. People may have complex intermingled rights on certain subjects. That is not applicable to legal fictions, because they don't have rights and can't inherit rights.
I think it will become clear as you picture the silly idea of writing "I'm a piece of paper and I have rights" and then expecting that to mean anything. Work backwards from there.
Is the piece of paper a collective of people? Does the piece of paper have agents to enact the decisions of its rulling body? You seem to be forgetting the primary reason why corporations have rights in this perspective.
There's, objectively, an intermingling of rights happening inside an corporation, which derives directly from the "under a normative instrument" part of the definition of a corporation, which creates legal interactions between the rights of the members. That's simply a fact.
And, again, may I remind you, "rights", "laws", "norms", etc. are legal fiction. They don't have an actual corporeal body. Arguably, corporations have more of one given that they have agents, and the actions they do, on behalf of the corporation, is very material.
The one that backs the law, for instance. But, more broadly, corporations, specially ones ruled by shareholders/contracts, tend to have a will of their own, and "people" in ethics is more about will and desire than biology.
It's a dangerous game to anthropomorphize legal fictions by using terms like attributing "will" to them. Likewise by sneaking in priors with the term "people". It's best to stick to calling them legal fiction.
It might help to picture them as literally a piece of paper. It would be pretty silly to say that piece of paper has a "will of its own" or "rights" or calling it a "person", wouldn't it?
If I scribble "i am a person" on a piece of paper, it's still just a piece of paper. If I get a bunch of people to join in and scribble something on the same piece of paper, it's still just a piece of paper. There's no confusion over "rights" or "will". It's a piece of paper.
The usage of the term "will" isn't unwarranted nor simply an anthropomorphization for the sake of it. Long story short, it's the recognition that both individuals and corps (through their agents, not to be confused by their members) can enter into conflict. A legal conflict can only emerge between entities that have a "will". This isn't something I ascribed onto them, this is something I observed in them given the definitions I'm working with. I suspect our conflict lies in them.
The anthropomorphization simply emerges out of a shared property in this context. Keep in mind I haven't said anything about biology.
I don't buy it at all. For example, it's generally considered to be unethical to kill a person aside from limited circumstances such as self defense. Killing a person because they're no longer useful to you is Right Out in every ethical framework I've ever heard of. Are you implying that dissolving a corporation is unethical?
Depends on each jurisdiction. You'd have to look at which frameworks informed the laws that back each corporation.
On the topic of corporate dissolution, I see less as killing and more as natural death. When a corp dissolves in accordance to its norms and general ethics (or the jurisdiction it's under, at least), that's equivalent to someone naturally dying. The constituents no longer wish to participate and follow the binding rules that define the corp to dissolve it, enacting its "will", if you will (pun intended).
Something akin to murder would be a "hostile take over into a dissolution" situation, where a rogue member decides to unilaterally dissolve the corp in defiance of the other members despite having no legal justification, neither in the binding norms of the corp nor in their personal rights (although that's generally implied, as, in theory, no contract can violate this). I think we can agree that the latter case would indeed be unethical, if not illegal.
Also, killing people strictly because they are not useful to you is covered by a "rule by might" ethics framework. Not one I agree with, but it exists.
Why would it be a natural death when it's destroyed by another person?
Really this comes down to sloppy usage of words. You said the phrase yourself: "juridical people." You need that qualifier on it, "juridical," to distinguish from actual human beings. Because they're not the same. "Corporations are people" -> corporations are legal entities that share some of the same rights, privileges, and responsibilities as human beings. "Corporations aren't people" -> corporations are a distinct concept from human beings, including ethically and legally.
Legally, the argument comes down to how precise you're being. Is there an implied qualifier? Is the statement meant to convey that corporations are legally the same as natural persons (they aren't) or just that they are some sort of legal entity? And the whole dispute here is because people are interpreting it differently.
To rephrase the comment some replies above: "Because corporations aren't natural people."
All the discussion about corporate personhood is off the mark, because corporate personhood only means that corporations have some of the rights that natural persons have, and voting is not generally among them. Although apparently it is in one town in Delaware.
Because the another personin question is one the constituents acting in behalf of the corporation itself. Perhaps it's closer to suicide, but still, it's not just "another person", but, in a sense, a part of the corporation itself.
I think the dispute is more about interpretation. Ultimately, what I've shown is more of a perspective (one I believe it's useful due to the legal interplay of rights that happen inside), but one can just look at corporations by looking at their members, agents and the rules they've agreed prior and I suspect it would be equivalent to treating corporations as real people, presuming jusnaturalism.
Given that voting is a right currently derived from a more juspositivistic perspective, the justifications behind who's considered a "natural person" and who gets to vote are pretty arbitrary.
Which is why elsewhere I make the argument that we should strongly reject the terminology of "people" in any relation to corporations. It leads people down bad mental thought processes by sneaking in priors.
Corporations are not "X people". Corporations are not people, period. Natural people are just people.
I had the same logic as you previously, actually. But, eventually, I realized the terminology is not as misleading as it appears.
Try defining what is "people". What is "natural people". Why do "natural people" have "rights". What is a "corporation". How does a "corporation" differ from any other legal fiction. So on.
because the city of Fenwick Island decided it wanted to set things up a different way, the ACLU challenged, and the judge said the city can it up how they want to.
The question is not what the law says (the headline is sufficient to understand that), but why people are doing this at all. If corporations are just proxies for their owners, then owners who want a vote could just own the property in their own name rather than their corporation's and problem solved. There is some reason they don't do this. I want rayiner to spell it out for me, because that "a corporation is just a proxy" line is 100% horseshit.
> If corporations are just proxies for their owners, then owners who want a vote could just own the property in their own name rather than their corporation's and problem solved
Exactly! They could do that, so the law shouldn’t treat the two situations differently. You just proved my point, not yours.
> There is some reason they don't do this
I’m sure they have many reasons. But that doesn’t change the fact that the corporation is a proxy for people.
Your real argument seems to be that you think people should have to choose between exercising their rights and having the protections of the corporate form.
Likewise, the fact that corporations act as proxies in some ways doesn't mean that they must act as proxies for votes.
Obviously, the court has ruled that they do in fact act that way. But we're talking about what should be, not what is.
The question of whether corporate owners of residences should be able to vote in this town is not at all obvious, certainly doesn't merit dismissal with a glib "corporations are just proxies." They aren't just proxies. In some respects they are, in others they aren't. If they were nothing but proxies then there'd be no point to them.
> I want rayiner to spell it out for me, because that "a corporation is just a proxy" line is 100% horseshit.
Not the original author, but generically, there are a few reasons why one would place a residential property in a distinct legal entity.
Most commonly it's to shield a property against others - spouses, children or other relatives with legal inheritance claims, especially if the jurisdiction in question treats corporate ownership more favorably to the goal of the person in question than they treat real estate ownership. In some cases, cough Rene Benko, the aim is to have a corporate veil against the government or creditors, although more commonly a trust is the chosen vehicle instead of a corporation.
The other way around is rare, but also works - the legal entity caps your exposure. Think of, say, your house catches fire due to shoddy electrical works. Some dumbass neighbor kid climbs over a fence, drowns in your pool and is barely rescued in time, but their brain is now fried for good and the kid will need 80 years in intensive assisted living. You own your home outright? All of your other wealth can be seized now to make the neighbors whole. However, if a LLC owns that home, your exposure is now limited to the value of the home - the LLC goes bankrupt, the house is sold off with the proceeds going to the neighbors, you can keep the rest of your wealth.
Right. And maybe in exchange for that, you don't get a non-resident vote anymore. That doesn't sound outrageous to me. If the LLC were a pure proxy then none of these advantages would apply. It makes sense that there might be some tradeoffs involved.
The problem is corporations mostly don't have the same interests in communities as people and they are motivated by other concerns that can run counter to the good of society. So yea.
Setting aside the corporation part, is there precedent for allowing people to vote in multiple residences? In my experience, when you register to vote in one location you are no longer allowed to vote where you were previously registered, regardless of how many places you own houses. Some places cross-reference voter registrations to enforce this, and others don't really check, but it has been the rule everywhere I have lived.
New York Times Co. v. Sullivan - and the First Amendment it draws upon - applies to everyone, regardless of what corporation they may or may not work for. An unemployed person is protected from defamation claims by public figures under it just fine.
It does not establish any special corporate rights.
Sullivan absolutely establishes corporate rights. Otherwise, Trump could enact a ban on “fake news” and say it applies only to the corporation itself, not the staff. The staff can write whatever they want, but the corporation can’t use its printing presses, etc., to disseminate what the government considers fake news.
> Otherwise, Trump could enact a ban on “fake news” and say it applies only to the corporation itself, not the staff.
That's some really tortured logic.
Such an act would simply be a violation of the First Amendment (and Article I, for that matter). The corporate nature of its target is, again, entirely irrelevant.
Sullivan sets a high standard for defamation claims by public figures. That's it. They protect you saying defamatory things about Hillary Clinton as long as you don't write down "I know this is false and I'm defaming her because I hate her guts" explicitly somewhere.
> The corporate nature of its target is, again, entirely irrelevant.
Why? In New York Times v. Sullivan, the corporation was being sued for what it did. The New York Times reporter didn’t print and distribute all those newspapers. The corporation did that.
And what you’re calling “tortured logic” was in fact the government’s argument in Citizens United. It argued that it wasn’t regulating the filmmaker. It was regulating the corporation spending funds to make and distribute the film. So it sounds like we agree Citizens United was correctly decided!
To save everyone some trouble, "some Delaware elections" refers to elections in a town that amended its charter to explicitly allow legal entities to vote.
More accurately: the town charter allows non-residents to vote if they own property on the island, even if the property is owned through a corporation.
I have no problem with individual jurisdictions controlling how their domestic-chartered companies operate/speak/vote — particularly with the recent Hawai'ian example: [in attempts of] reversing Citizens United, by removing political speech from corporate entities. Bravo, Hawaii.
This ruling is the exact opposite of the recent proposal from Hawaii.
That ruling is predicated on the state having control over corporations and how they behave. This ruling in Delaware is affirming a clear path for corporations to have control over the state (county, city etc).
With this ruling, it affirms a corporations ability to form air tight rule over municipal governments and operate them as they see fit. Once a corporation manufactures a majority vote in this municipality, they can then amend any rules they see fit, install their own executive leadership and have removed any corporate control over it.
In the thin sense these are both jurisdictions controlling how corporations behave, but one cedes complete control to corporations and the other vastly limits a corporation's ability to exert political control.
>This ruling is the exact opposite of the recent proposal from Hawaii.
Understood, but state-control of corporate charters (in both cases) is the underlying enabler.
>In the thin sense these are both jurisdictions controlling how corporations behave, but one cedes complete control to corporations and the other vastly limits a corporation's ability to exert political control.
My original claim is that states ought'a have Tenth Amendment Rights – no? – what they do with it also ought'a be up to their homerulings.
----
Personally, I support Hawaii's newfound corporate speech limitation.
> Personally, I support Hawaii's newfound corporate speech limitation.
Couldn't agree more!
My point is that it is the same underlying power, but one is using the power to maintain and grow powers over corps, the other using the same power to cede it.
You can register a corporation in Delaware for $109.
The Town of Fenwick Island mentioned here has a population of 400.
It's high noon for this matter, & about time to start repealing corporate rights. The undoing of this travesty should be a federal project. But hopefully Delaware can course correct themselves, and reverse the mega-threat to humanity they have been unleashing. At least states like Hawaii are heading in the opposite direction already, saying corporations are not people and denying them human speech rights. Potentially immortal easy to spawn companies should indeed not be granted full human rights. https://inequality.org/article/hawaii-targets-citizens-unite...
Doing this at scale might be even cheaper than that. A Delaware Series LLC is $300/year, which then lets you make an unlimited number of independent legal entities. You don't even have to file paperwork with the state to create these new entities, just your own internal bookkeeping. Although presumably you'd have to file paperwork to transfer them a tiny sliver of real estate ($$), register to vote (free), and to actually vote (free).
The original complaint cites no minimum land ownership requirement and the judgement does not seem to make specific disagreement with this fact as best I can tell, so that is my understanding as well.
The state of Hawaii was the most recent to be expropriated from its natives at the behest of corporate landlords, so they're probably a bit raw about it.
Having corporations be distinct entities whose investors have limited liability is a pretty fundamental to a lot of things. But voting? That is way too far.
If a corporation owns property somewhere but none of its owners actually live there, the corporation itself still obviously has an interest in local governance. It sounds like this locality has decided that property ownership qualfies the owner to a vote. Not all the investors in that corporation get to vote, rather the corporate entity, as a singular thing, gets one vote.
One can imagine all kinds of abusive scenarios with shell corporations created just to get votes, but sounds like the judge thought that these imaginary scenarios were not demonstrated to be actually happening. Courts typically rule only on demonstrated harm or other actual evidence, not "what if" conjectures.
I absolutely agree. They shouldn't be able to vote and they shouldn't have free speech rights. Corporations are a legal structure - a way to allow risk sharing to encourage investment that would otherwise maybe not happen if one had to risk everything in order to invest. But when we choose to allow that, and it is a choice, we should not give those entities the rights of people. It is simply absurd.
Then it wouldn't be a big deal to change that charter, right? Right? Right? Of course, if the actual locals are bothered by it - not us on the internet with exactly zero dogs in that fight.
This case is specifically about allowing voting for non-resident property owners when the ownership is held by a corporation rather than a natural person.
The poster did not indicate how they hold their ownership. Many people hold their real estate indirectly; a trust is common; if I read the opiniom correctly, a majority of properties in the municipality in question are held in trust.
No. One person, one vote, with registration tied to where you live.
Now, to discuss No Taxation Without Representation: we haven’t had proper representation since the number of representatives in the house was capped because we ran out of space for more chairs, so personally I consider that ship has sailed. I would love to get back to a place where We The People had representation. Alas we do not. Let’s start by addressing the absolutely absurd chair problem.
Well, if we're going to go all Star Wars with it, let's elect some kids to office. Smart kids. Kids with a sense of justice and fairness. But yes, I expect a sphere might be the best layout. Like King Arthur's Round Table, there is no head or foot.
I don't understand how this thread went from something like #10 on the main page down to #186 in a matter of an hour, despite being more active than most of the threads it is competing with. Can someone more familiar with HN rankings explain this one to me?
I suppose that could make sense. It's still rather unfortunate, as this is a concerning development that could probably use some more awareness around it.
This system was designed decades ago "To stop flamewars" and not been changed or fixed or improved in any way despite a drastically changing internet and world.
The purpose of a system is what it does, especially when chances to change or improve that system are ignored.
Similarly, HN is for "interesting discussion" which is why "politics is banned" even though it is explicitly not because the one time we tried to literally ban politics it was self evident how stupid, unworkable, and self defeating of a policy it is, and it lead to zero "interesting discussion", but whatever hype fad is popular right now fills the entire board to capacity at all times, with nothing more than the standard talking points either way, and somehow the 37th post about "AI slop but by a different Substack account nobody has heard of before" is interesting discussion.
"Too many comments for their votes", which is not made transparent to us because god forbid we understand why things happen in our community.
This reads like satire from a Slate commentary piece on Citizens United. I suppose we’re just waiting around until the majority of corporations in the US are formed and operated by AI agents. And then…
Most corporations in the US are legalized mafias. Well, and in Spain and the rest of Europe, almost literally, with bribes and such. Don't ever talk about some practices from El Corte Inglés, La Liga, estate companies, construction sections and tourism and the like. Basically we don't have proper remote working "thanks" to the construction and estate lobbies.
And from media/TV corpos, ahem... Mediaset and Atresmedia, there have been internal wars too. Sometimes even with death threats.
And as I said, not just Spain. Germany, France, the Netherlands, even Iceland has tons of shaddy corporate stuff.
Do you know what you get when corporates do what they want with no consecuences? The South of Italy. Because I'm pretty sure the North of Italy it's a gem... polished with the misery of shaddy business from the South.
For sure they must be tons of money laundering down there. Ditto with some barber shops, smartphone cover/case shops, some laundries, kebabs, TONs of bars and pubs in Spain. I have more than 10 bars around me in less than 100 meters around. Think about it, all of them can't be as profitable except for a major main street where everyone hangs out. On average 1 in 10 or 20 bars in around must be selling more than spirits...
If the common folk has to this to survive, just imagine what a billion based corporation could be doing. And the CEO's, welll... pure psychos and OFC with the profiles you would find around Epstein, and not just with pedophilic tendencies -which is power related, not sex-. The small CEO's will resort to cocaine and night clubs with prostitutes. The big ones... just run away from these people. Seriously.
Incorrect - this is southern delaware homie. While the northern portions enjoy the storied histories of great Delawareans like Harriett Tubman, the rest is a mix of that and some who’d prefer a more sterile white future.
You asserted "Everyone in this story is a Democrat".
That seems unlikely, given the town is a red precinct.
No one said anything about Trump's fault, just that there are clearly people and entire regions in Delaware who vote Republican. Look how red that map is - plenty of Republicans in local government.
It's a low effort partisan comment, but "Republicans" generally represent the naked corporate agenda (bad cop) while the "Democrats" at least try to hide it and throw the People some concessions (good cop).
Don't play coy. We are obviously talking about the overall national political landscape, extrapolating from this one development to its part in a larger trend. The specific politics of Delaware (which team is the incumbent and how the state is openly corporate friendly) don't change that.
I haven't highlighted anything here. I actually characterized the original comment as a "low effort partisan comment".
This development is also not a counter example - Both parties routinely do the bidding of corporate entrenched interests, but they market it in different ways. So an instance of Democrats advancing the corporatist agenda isn't some gotcha like you're making it out to be.
Though perhaps by "undermine" you just mean it's something for other partisans to latch onto to support their own rationalizations rather than coming to terms with that "broader narrative".
> Karsnitz dismissed the lawsuit from Delaware’s Superior Court, citing “the principle of one person/entity/one vote.”
What? The principle is "one person, one vote". I'd like to cite the principle of "one person, one vote, unless they're named recursivecaveat in which case 1 trillion votes" to assert my rights in the Fenwick island elections please.
> Visions of faceless large corporations or even HAL controlling a small town are frightening and the stuff of science fiction
The City of London and Hong Kong have half of the voting power held by corporations and City of London is older than any US state, and colony. And so are some of the guilds
Universal suffrage at all, and exclusive to natural persons, is more science fiction than corporations voting
This seems disingenuous. The City of London and Hong Kong being "corporations". They're still nations. It's like Pennsylvania arguing that it's a Commonwealth and not a state. When people do not have equal representation under the law the people are not free. We call it authoritarianism.
Fascinating news for you is that nobody is saying any of those things.
I said, and factually, that voting power is held by corporations within those states, just like within this town in Delaware. Nothing to do with what you wrote about semantics of the state’s own incorporation reality or fiction
One of the interesting patterns for suffrage has been that it doesn't matter.
Before Great Reform the vast majority of British people can't vote, after it all the moderately wealthy men can now vote. So did that result in massive political change, reflecting the newly enfranchised people's preferences? Nope. Subsequent tinkering expanded suffrage slightly but again, the results were the same. Then last century they did several things in quick succession (often portrayed as "universal suffrage" but as we'll see that's just what people always call any expansion, the "universe" of one's imagination grows). First they gave all men (including poor men), and older women suffrage. This made no appreciable difference except that, having now entertained the idea that women should vote (it wasn't technically illegal before Great Reform it just didn't happen enough to matter) the women realised hey, maybe women should be politicians and that did cause some modest changes. Then they equalised voting age for men and women, so now a 21 year old can vote regardless of gender.
Later in that century the UK gave almost† all 18 year olds the vote too, and again the worry was maybe a 19 year old will vote differently? Nope. More or less the same results.
So, maybe giving corporations the vote changes nothing, but I'm less hopeful than I was for giving Sarah, an 18 year living with her parents on benefits the vote knowing that for some insane reason she's not actually much more likely to vote against a "Fuck Sarah, take her money away" policy than everybody else is because apparently all people are morons so giving more of them suffrage changed nothing. I think corporations are psychopaths not morons...
† Although most crooks in the UK aren't magically stopped from voting, they can't vote in prison and in practice it's very hard to vote from prison even if it would be legal for you because you're held there prior to a trial or whatever. So that's not ideal. It is controversial whether specific electoral interference crimes should result in withdrawal of suffrage, as is the practice today or whether that's just petty and ultimately futile.
[[ I still support universal suffrage, but because now it's everybody's fault. You're not going to get a good government, but now the terrible government is your fault too. ]]
The problem with companies being treated like people is that they are only afforded the -good- aspects and not the -bad- ones. This is an out for the rich to become 'more equal' by owning companies and having expanded rights that the average person doesn't. If this is really just a delegation of rights then fine. One vote, one person that is actually eligible, and not by right of them owning that company, for that vote explicitly delegates that one instance of that right. Same with campaign finance and all the other 'good parts' companies are getting without the bad parts. If these companies really are people then why aren't they actually being thrown in jail when they commit crimes? Why aren't they on death row when they kill people for money? Rights without responsibility and repercussions is tyranny since -some actual person- is now forced to feel that responsibility and the repercussions that this company pushed off.
> Visions of faceless large corporations or even HAL controlling a small town are frightening and the stuff of science fiction.
Company towns are well-recorded history, not science fiction. Lost Hills California (home of Wonderful Pistachios) exists in the real, present, non-fictional world.
That does not make it not frightening nor not the stuff of science fiction. We know how awful corporate towns are that’s partly why cyberpunk is what it is.
Not always... Bentonville is actually pretty great: https://youtu.be/sIwslwoQUKY
There’s really nothing inherently profane about the concept, it’s just often abused. I’d love to see a few working examples out in the real world, personally.
> There’s really nothing inherently profane about the concept, it’s just often abused.
The same thing can be said about any autocratic government, but the practical and documented historical issues are why they are not liked. Just as dictatorship works well when you have a good ruler who cares about the people, the issue isn't if you get a bad ruler, but when.
The same can be said about literally anything in existence, from this incredibly inane point of view. Lots of things are historically dangerous and only work well when people who don't suck is running it.
Most things suck when someone shitty is running it. This is the worst argument of all time. There's really no reason, based on the very bad argument you've presented here, to assume a local, state, or federal government would be any better than any corporation. Please, I beg of you, come up with some argument that takes more than two seconds to disregard.
> Most things suck when someone shitty is running it. This is the worst argument of all time.
I actually think it is the only argument.
As Churchill mused:
"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…"
Company towns, communism, etc are bad specifically because of their ease of abuse, which is why our best (least worst) systems of governing are focused on transparency, accountability and minimizing abuse. It sucks that all that friction makes it less efficient, but alas we need to plan for the/humanities worst, because it continually crops up.
> Lots of things are historically dangerous and only work well when people who don't suck is running it.
Authoritarian dictatorships always have people who sux on top. They are created by people who sux in the forst place and there is only a little to make them accountable.
And incentives placed on rules and their underlings ensure they will sux even when they did not originally.
Cool, we’re not discussing authoritarian dictatorships - we’re discussing company towns.
Pullman, IL was the model of a company town and started off as a reasonable (if paternalistic) approach to providing good housing and services to your employees.
Unsurprisingly, it did not last.
I mean... Larry Ellison bought an entire Hawaiian island... from the Dole family
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C4%81na%CA%BBi
His owning of a volcanic island is what solidifies him as a Bond villain for me.
Dupont, WA is another
Water main upgrade canceled because Sandeep from Nepal voted against it.
It's specifically about corporations that own property in a specific town voting. So no you can't just spin up a bunch of LLCs to rig an election, this is about the rights of absentee landlords.
> So no you can't just spin up a bunch of LLCs to rig an election…
Sure you can. You just have to sell them some land as part of it.
Why become a lord in Scotland when you can become a voter in Delaware.
Land is bought and sold in government-regulated parcels. You can't just split up an acre of land into square foot plots and sell them.
Lets be armchair evil for a sec...
What is the smallest subplot you can split a parcel into?
And are we talking literally land, or would condo ownership suffice? (After all, you typically stack a few condos on top of one parcel of land). The smallest condo is probably dictated by some pesky human habitability rules, but what class of property has the fewest minimum-square-footage zoning rules? Retail probably has egress rules, but what about industrial spaces?
Could you create an industrial park to house a bunch of, to use a rough metaphor, independently-owned/independently-operated phone booths (or whatever other "qualifying use")?
Basically is there a category of land-use you could split ownership off at ridiculous scale, offer LLC-as-a-service to buy a bunch of them, and just for fun, tokenize the votes to provably aggregate the absentee ballots at scale via blockchain?
If it's one-entity-one-vote, what is the most cost-effective way to maximize the number of qualifying entities?
Bonus points for every order of magnitude of synthetic votes you can reasonably achieve over the fleshy variety.
In most areas, especially any that are at all developed, land parcels and minimum lot sizes are under the control of a county or city commission, council, board, etc. Subdividing a property is as expensive and time consuming as you might imagine dealing with the government, you'll probably need a lawyer to do it properly, have to appear before at at least one if not several public meetings or hearings, etc. And they will almost certainly deny any petition along the lines of the examples you offered.
Where I am, things like dividing a 5 acre rural property so that a mother-in-law can live in a cottage near her family are routinely denied.
You mean under the control of the commissions, councils, boards, etc that are being elected in these very elections? Elections in which many actual humans may not be paying attention to positions on "arcane" land use rules, but the non-human legal entities in question (or their managers) will be?
>under the control of the commissions, councils, boards, etc
Let me save you some words.
Next time just call them "the local real estate developer slime balls" because that's who makes up the vase majority of these organizations. Like maybe a particularly upstanding town might have a local banker or lawyer on one of the boards or something.
These are not democratic institutions. They are business groups that happen to be part of government.
These organizations are already in the pocket of business interests. If anything this change is destabilizing because it now means that the PE owned car-wash and the company that owns a bunch of chain franchise businesses in the town as well as every local business that owns land or the landlords thereof but is owned by people who live in the surrounding towns can push back and say "screw you, we're not all willing to bend over and take it so you can make another buck developing another street of McMansions".
Letting megacorps vote is probably bad. But I think we should see where this goes. There's a lot of "enemy of my enemy" potential here for the currently disenfrachinsed business interests to push back on the business interests that are in bed with government to the benifit of the people. Enemy of my enemy is my ally and all that.
I read this as basically an attempt to run around the rotton borough mitigations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotten_and_pocket_boroughs
> What is the smallest subplot you can split a parcel into?
An acre, here. See your local zoning code or land statutes for minimum lot sizes. Consult agreements that run with the land for additional restrictions.
Sure, corporations would _never_ get into the real estate market...
Why not? Isn't it fundamentally the same idea as apartment complex tenets getting votes? Why couldn't a business sell off lockers to companies giving them voting access? Walk in Closets? Very small room apartments? What's the minimum size of real-estate needed?
Except if I really wanted to be an awful human being, I'd just buy property, subdivide it, and then multiply my votes in the town election by the number of property units I've individually sold to my various LLCs.
This is kind of a violation of the "one man one vote" ideal that is the bedrock of our society. It easily turns in to "money buys influence" which is exactly the opposite of what made the US a great country to live in. If you don't understand that and you're a US Citizen you should really retake the civics / political science classes from high school.
Totally agree. The argument I'm making is that this Delaware ruling is terrible for exactly the reasons you are outlining.
The judge effectively said in the conclusion "Trust me, there's no abuse and this is fine".
I find myself defending this shitty ruling (which I honestly think is bad, but bad for completely other reasons) the ruling basically says, since corporations are not using this to dilute the vote it's fine, which basically means in other words, if corporations where to do the shenanigans you're suggesting, the judge is open to revising the ruling.
Yes, you can. The county does not appear to be registered land (Torrens title) where the Registry would have some say in whether a transfer is valid. So you can straightforwardly hire a surveyor to draw up a plot plan with many square foot chunks, and then execute and record a different deed for each of them.
What would happen if the deed (a contract) was an agreement to violate the law restricting minimum lot sizes and was therefor illegal?
It would be void and regardless of recordation, no transfer or subdivision would have occurred.
My point was that the laws regarding those minimum lot sizes are about buildable lots. Although now that I'm looking into this I think the snag would be trying to record that plot plan, where the Registry would be mechanically looking for a town approval stamp on the plan before they were willing to record it.
But a new avenue has occurred to me that actually saves money on deed costs - nothing prevents multiple corporate entities from jointly owning a piece of real estate on one deed, right? So you could conceivably create one Delaware Series LLC, create an unlimited number of distinct legal entities with that, and then write one deed that lists all of those entities as joint owners of the single piece of real estate. Basically similar to multiple residents living in one house, and each getting a vote (but applied to infinitely scalable corporate entities!)
The fundamental flaw here is the law framing the entity itself as having voting rights (also why this attracts so much attention!), whereas if it were framed such that every beneficial owner with over say 35% of the ownership interest could vote, that would be intrinsically limiting.
This idea is equally wrong for different reasons, but I do have a measure of appreciation for you having abandoned your first intrinsically broken idea upon the first resistance you encountered. Fail fast!
Why would thirty companies that owned a company together get one vote each instead of one thirtieth? The thirty companies would each have one vote in determining how to vote the one parent's vote.
(You are, however, correct to note that you can record absolute gibberish if you want to, so long as you pay the recorder. This does not effectuate a transfer of land, though; it merely serves as constructive notice to the person who is bound to look for such recorded notice, i.e., the beneficial purchaser for value. In a way, you could think of the function of a recorder as preventer of race conditions, not the database).
Well the choice was either accept the likelihood of a common restriction that seems to exist in many places, or dig into the actual specifics of the law in this Delaware county. I don't need to give myself a headache for fun.
Why would thirty companies each get a vote? Because that is what the charter says. There wouldn't be one parent company, rather the real estate would be owned by them all directly as tenants in common.
> 9. A. (2) Non-residents. Every property owner as of March 1 prior to the annual municipal election, whether a natural person or artificial entity, including but not limited to corporations, partnerships, trusts, and limited liability companies, and who is registered to vote, if provided by ordinance, shall have one (1) vote. A natural person shall be a citizen of the United States and age 18 on or before the date of the election. An artificial entity shall be a domestic entity in the State of Delaware.
https://charters.delaware.gov/fenwickisland.html
So they must be Delaware entities. Another thing I'm giving up on is that the Series LLC might not work. While each Series is legally independent from the others, I think they still might not be considered distinct "entities" (once again, not looking to give myself a headache to solidly determine that).
So either do one LLC/corporation per vote, or perhaps trusts might be even cheaper (no idea what filing/recording would be required for trusts, especially to substantiate them enough to register to vote)
For now. Corporations rule the world, and there's nothing that a few bribes here and there can't fix. Hell, they've gotten the right to vote, in spite of all common sense and constitutional arguments. What makes you think they won't be able to go all the way and take over the entire democratic process?
You can't just split up an acre of land into square foot plots and sell them, so far.
say I partitipate in .. 8 businesses in the district, and all of them are independent corporate entities that own the land they operate on. and each of them has multiple owners. I have some influence in the vote of all of these companies, and maybe we can even assume that most of the owners have similar views on things like property taxes in districts they don't reside in.
how many votes in that district do I have?
How about fuck absentee landlords, especially if they're not actually people?
Seriously, there should be exceptions for the rare case it's an actual person who can't go for an actual reaaon
What right?
There is no right for non-residents of a city to vote in that city elections just because they own property there. Owning that property via a LLC shouldn't change that.
Why can't corporations be toen councilors or mayors in those same towns? A privilege availed to other voters there.
I'm being sarcastic because I don't like it. Corporations are a simulacrum of people, and at best, their personhhood a useful legal fiction under very limited number of scenarios.
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I don't think this is a good opinion or anything, but issues with vote dilution were expressly addressed in the opinion.
Why are you pretending this argument wasn't addressed in the opinion?
But it wasn't, really.
> Where a voter is entitled to vote by virtue of being both a resident and as an owner of real property, that voter shall be entitled to only one vote; where a voter is entitled to vote by ownership of two or more parcels of real property, that voter shall be entitled to only one vote.
> Any legal entity other than a natural person entitled to vote, must cast its vote by a duly executed and notarized power of attorney from the legal entity granting the authority to cast its vote to its designated attorney-in-fact… The person casting the ballot for such entity shall be age 18 on or before the date of the election and a citizen of the United States.
That just means I have to give 100 people POAs.
Also what constitutes ownership here? Couldn't some Enterprising Individuals open 100 shell companies, pool together resources and form the Legalize Asbestos Consortium, the Consortium buys a plot of land and then each stakeholder of the Consortium counts as an owner of the plot of land?
FWIW, it sounds like the judge may be open to ruling against such an action. From his decision at https://aboutblaw.com/blQg:
> Even if Plaintiff had made a “vote dilution” or “one person/one vote” claim under the Equal Protection Clause, it fails. Plaintiff does not assert facts that would adequately support such a claim. Plaintiff does not allege... that natural person voters are a minority or are politically cohesive [or] that entity property owners vote sufficiently as a bloc to usually defeat the preferred candidates of natural persons.
Although he also notes that the recent Callais case, severely weakening section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, may change this - and, of course, waiting until the Legalize Asbestos Consortium is doing its thing and trying to file a lawsuit is much more complex than preemptively saying "only natural persons can vote."
Asbestos is still used today in some instances. Should’ve used heroin or something
So is heroin.
Oh? Which industry regularly uses this as a part of standard business for consumers? Unless... you're just pretending to be too obtuse to understand the extremely obvious implication here.
As with asbestos, it (diamorphine) has some limited legitimate uses.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3953108
What would probably happen is that all the the owners of the property would have to designate one POA among themselves to represent their collective interest in that property.
I didn't see anything about this in the opinion.
It does say that multiple owners of a single property can not have their voting rights apportioned by value, as this would be dilution or would not fit one person/one vote.
This sounds completely absurd. What's stopping me from starting up a bunch of LLCs or Trusts to rig the vote?
Read the opinion.
> I appreciate that Plaintiff may disagree with Delaware’s policy of authorizing certain municipalities to allow voting on behalf of entity property owners. Visions of faceless large corporations or even HAL, 55 controlling a small town are frightening and the stuff of science fiction. However, Plaintiff has not demonstrated that this policy violates the principle of one person/entity/one vote.
The answer to the question asked is not here. Accusing somebody of seeing "visions" is not an answer, it is an evasion.
It fundamentally violates one person/entity/one vote. Corporations are not sentient. If you let them vote, a person gets to vote twice. There's no way around that conflict. I feel like this has to collapse on appeal or the nation is doomed.
> a person gets to vote twice.
how do they do that?
The owner votes as themselves, and again as the corporate entity.
No. Per the ruling:
> Where a voter is entitled to vote by virtue of being both a resident and as an owner of real property, that voter shall be entitled to only one vote; where a voter is entitled to vote by ownership of two or more parcels of real property, that voter shall be entitled to only one vote.
However, that seems to get messy with multi-owner LLCs where you might give 1% of each LLC to a bunch of your buddies and have them each vote as POA for theirs.
The POA is to vote as a proxy for the entity. The entity gets one vote. Not one vote per shareholder.
If you’re a shareholder in 5 companies, each owning 2 parcels of land, each with their own PoA, and you yourself hold land — then you have “influence” into 6 votes, though only direct ownership of 1 vote
1 person 1 vote does not mean in each city where they own property.
"One person, one vote" is clearly a per-race thing, or I'd violate it by voting for President and Senator at the same time.
This did not refute what I said.
You said:
> The owner votes as themselves, and again as the corporate entity.
Per the opinion, which I quoted above, this is not the case.
(I do think it gets instantly messy with multi-owner corporations, though.)
Refreeze5224 said what you claimed I said.
You quoted Fenwick's charter. Where a voter is entitled to vote [in Fenwick] by virtue of being both a resident [in Fenwick] and as an owner of real property [in Fenwick], that voter shall be entitled to only one vote [in Fenwick]; where a voter is entitled to vote [in Fenwick] by ownership of two or more parcels of real property [in Fenwick], that voter shall be entitled to only one vote [in Fenwick]. You dispute this meaning?
Refreeze5224 did not say in Fenwick.
The context is clearly "in Fenwick".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48295844
The strongest plausible interpretation of josefritzishere and Refreeze5224 was the judge was wrong because voting in 2 places would violate 1 person 1 vote. Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.[1]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
But that's not true, either.
My town has a village at its core; village residents vote in two places.
Our school district doesn't perfectly match the town's borders, either, so some folks vote in two places there.
One person gets one vote in a particular election.
This is not what people mean when they say vote in 2 places commonly. And I said 2 cities before.
1 person 1 vote is an expression of equal representation.[1] Someone who votes in city 1 and city 2 and someone who votes in city 1 solely have unequal representation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_man%2C_one_vote
Whoever dictates the company vote then votes for themselves.
It sounds like you it's only corporations that own property in the town that get to vote. So that's probably whats preventing you.
Wonder how long it is before there's a vote to allow the sale of inch-square lots.
besides zoning laws, the judge fairly explicitly states that one of the reasons he thinks it's fine is because corporations aren't doing these kinds of shenanigans, so if you were to do something like that he might revise the ruling.
IANAA. It would seemed to be recorded, not registered, land. Which means I wouldn't think approval would be required in the first place (the lot isn't going to be buildable though, of course]
Exactly. Same thing as offices set up to register out of state businesses.
I own property in a nearby town but it's an investment; I don't live there. I'm unable to vote in their local elections. I have not heard of property ownership being a qualification to vote since the 1800s.
Which makes sense... why should anyone get a say in the local matters of a place they don't even live in?
I own property there, I pay property taxes there (at the highest "non-owner-occupied" rate), in my case I'm actively operating a business not (just) a passive investor. Why should I have zero say in how those taxes are spent, or other local governance? I'm not a disinterested bystander.
If you want a say, live there.
I pay sales taxes in other cities I travel in, I too should get a say in how they run their government. Money, after all, is the top virtue in a democracy; if it wasn't why did the founders ensure that slavers had equal representation?
> Money, after all, is the top virtue in a democracy
"The Founders" of the US (however you want to form that category) were not the arbiters of what is virtuous about Democracy. Democracy is orthogonal to US law and intent. The PR for the US has always tried to message that they are a singular ethos.
I would say the difference is that as a property owner I have a long-term local presence and vested interest there, I am (in theory) motivated to make thoughtful decisions about local governance, as opposed to a disinterested bystander passing through and paying local sales tax on a soft drink.
You can't have a presence if you're not present.
My parents own two properties, but they have to decide which one they are residents of, because they are not entitled to a say in how both local governments are run.
If I am a long-term owner of Google stock, I still don't get a say in how Mountain View runs their city. A "vested financial interest" in an area should not be enough to give one a vote on local laws.
I guess the Walton family has a long-term local presence in basically every mid to large town and city in america. Same with Mcdonalds Corp. They have vested interests there (crushing competition, raising prices, lower quality, profit!). And their bigly profits certainly show a more significant vested interest as opposed to just a small property owner or worse a bystander or citizen.
That’s a fair point, but the ACLU didn’t challenge that aspect of the municipal charter.
Because you have a vested interest in the success of that region by owning land (and a business) at that location. You have skin in the game compared to someone who is just renting and can easily flee to a different city if they vote poorly.
>renting and can easily flee to a different city if they vote poorly.
Nitpick:
I think you're correct that the problem is people who do selfish shortsighted things and leave others holding the bag but I think you are blaming the wrong people.
Pretty much everyone from Marx to MLK to Rand and Sowell identifies somme sort of class of "comfortable enough to meddle in things to further their self interest at everyone else's detriment" demographics as the root of a whole bunch of bad stuff.
In most municipalities middle class who are too tied into the place (often through home ownership) to just get out that provide the bulk of the political will to do short sighted "feels good" stuff that solves some minor problem they have but screws the whole place on a 20-50yr timeline (by which time the individuals responsible will have retired and cashed out to Idaho or Florida or whatever).
Owning property through a corporation is trivial. 3 of my nearby neighbors are owned via an LLC (rentals).
* Start an LLC/C-corp for a trivial amount of money.
* Purchase land, but instead of paying with it via a personal check, you need a touch of foresight so you can "capitalize" the corporation you just started. Write the check from the corporation, instead of your personal checkbook.
yeah so it sounds like if you did this IN THIS TOWN and didn't also live in the town you'd get a vote. I'm not sure if you'd get a vote if you owned the land directly but for all I know you might.
IANAA, but having looked into it this does very little to actually reduce the liability exposure from small businesses. The minute you do anything yourself, you start to accrue personal liability. The only way to keep the corporate veil intact is to hire other people. So it only works if you're rich enough to hire a management company to do everything (screen tenants, maintenance/inspections, supervise contractors, etc) and you manage it as a purely financial investment. Just like the anonymity aspect doesn't work out in most states unless you're willing to shell out for an attorney to be the manager. In general these laws aren't made to help little people.
A quick Google search suggests Fenwick Island has ~400 residents. The only thing stopping you would be someone else with more resources.
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I was daydreaming about, picture if a corporation buys an entire state.
Say, Wyoming or West Virginia. Gemini guesses $180 billion to $250 billion.
With that investment, they'd get to control who lives in the state.
So, then the corporation gets to control who the Governor is. And the two Senators, and the seat in the Congress.
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but doesn't a single Senator have just a tremendous amount of power to block basically any legislation? With pocket vetoes, or silent filibusters?
Granted, actually buying a Senator is probably cheaper by a few orders of magnitude.
Senators can't veto, and filibusters require 40 other Senators to play ball.
The Constitution also overrides any attempt to prevent interstate migration.
"The Constitution also overrides any attempt to prevent interstate migration."
Sure, but if there is no where you can legally stay, because the sole landowner prohibits it, how do you migrate?
Sure, if we ignore how we get to "the sole landowner" scenario, which is a big hole in the thought experiment.
Look up Vernon CA history. It is pretty much this where there are a couple city owned residential properties, rest of city is nearly purely industrial, and tenancy of these tightly controlled to shape local election outcomes.
Same deal for Disney World until 2023.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Florida_Tourism_Oversi...
FWIW, you have a risk of losing your senator every 6 years, and senators don't have power in local matters.
Plus, the way things are going with conservatives pushing hard for federalism, owning local matters could become more important, anyway. You might be onto something...
I don’t understand why people have so much trouble understanding that a “corporation” is just a proxy for the humans that own and control the corporation. In this case, non-residents who own a house on the island can vote according to the charter. The charter just says that this doesn’t change because you move ownership of the house into a legal entity that some human then owns and controls.
The actual grievance seems to be unrelated to the corporation itself. People just associate “corporations” with rich people, and they won’t want rich people to vote.
> they won’t want rich people to vote.
I don't think anyone would object to a rich person casting a single vote and maybe putting a bumper sticker on their car or a sign in their yard. The issue people take with the rich and politics is the outsized influence they wield in elections. The whole "one person one vote" thing falls apart when the rich can throw millions at advertisements and millions at the "charities" run by the politicians they bought.
This is just a disagreement with the principle of free speech.
If you're only for free speech as long as it doesn't change people's minds, we have very different perspectives.
The issue isn't that people are trying to change people's minds. There are two issues here:
First, the rich have unimaginably more power in changing people's minds. This isn't sitting down at a bar and having a chat with hank to try to convince him to vote on prop 99. It is the wealthy putting their opinions on your phone, television, and billboards, reminding you of it multiple times per day. If politics is truly a contest of ideas, then the playing field needs to be level so that the ideas can be evaluated fairly, rather than it simply being a contest of who can buy enough ad space to brainwash people to vote against their interests.
Second, the wealthy don't have to change people's minds. They can purchase politicians by "donating" to them, going to million-dollar-per-plate dinners hosted by them, directly giving them money by staying in their hotels, etc. You don't have to convince a politician that they should vote on prop 99, you just need to pay them however much they want for their vote.
If the wealthy had exactly as much power in politics as a fireman or nurse, then I'd be all for their participation.
> First, the rich have unimaginably more power in changing people's minds
If that was true everyone would love billionaires. I'm fascinated by the cluelessness of this assertion!
The actual research on campaign finance says that once you've managed to inform the voters about what you stand for and who you are, further spending does very little.
> simply being a contest of who can buy enough ad space to brainwash people to vote against their interests
This is the most anti democratic statement I've seen in a while!
If you think voters are such easily brainwashed fools, you can hardly be pro democracy!
Money are not speech. Yes, I know supreme court is openly pro corruption and lawlessness when to comes to their guys. That does not mean I have to buy that sophistry too.
Is this rich person also voting in the place where they actually live? I'm not against a rich person voting, I just don't want them to get more than one vote. I haven't read the opinion to see if that's addressed.
The town charter allows double voting in municipal elections because it allows non-residents to vote.
Having grown up in a tourism/2nd home town I think this is probably a good thing. Keeps the place from being totally captured by local business interests.
But it would likely lead to other problems because the owner demographics are generally out of touch.
> Keeps the place from being totally captured by local business interests.
I'm pretty sure this is a fundimental design of the US system. There are things your city is allowed to do by state constitution. Things your county is allowed to do. And things only the state is allowed to do.
This is expressly to enable the people that live in that place the right to self governance.
Does a corporation need healthcare? Can a corporation be jailed? Does a corporation have a finite life in which they can pursue happiness? Does a corporation have offspring it's trying to raise? Does a corporation have hopes and dreams? Does a corporation wish to visit a park or visit with their neighbors? Are you for real?
Replace "corporation" in each of your questions above with "organizational model employed by people as a mechanism for coordinating complex activities", and the answers should all become clear.
Much of the discourse on this topic involves muddled, contradictory thinking that simultaneously argues "corporations aren't people" and "corporations are exercising autonomous agency as singular entities distinct from the people who constitute them". These two premises cannot both be true.
It _seems true_ when the people represented by the organizational model never face consequences for their actions, using the corporation as a liability shield.
So while corporations aren't people, they do seem to be exercising autonomous agency as singular entities distinct from the people who constitute them. Because by definition that is what a limited liability corporation provides? It seems that this is the crux of a lot of angst?
> It _seems true_ when the people represented by the organizational model never face consequences for their actions, using the corporation as a liability shield.
Corporations don't function as a liability shield in the sense you're talking about. The idea that people can individually engage in criminal or tortious conduct without any direct accountability is a myth -- limited liability protects investors from financial liabilities that exceed their investment, but it in no way shields corporate managers from liability for their own criminal conduct in managing the firm.
> So while corporations aren't people, they do seem to be exercising autonomous agency as singular entities distinct from the people who constitute them. Because by definition that is what a limited liability corporation provides?
No, it does not do that in any way, shape or form. Limited liability means that creditors can't foreclose on your house to cover the debts of a firm that you own $100 of stock in. It does not shield anyone actually managing the company from civil or criminal liability for their actions.
> It seems that this is the crux of a lot of angst?
That angst is attributable to believing in misinformation pushed advanced by factions who benefit from increasing conflict and controversy in our society.
Excellent reply thank you!
So why then does it seem that corporations do in fact shield executives from criminal charges? Is this just collusion among the well-off? Money buys verdicts?
I’m happy to take your word on limited liability as IANAL (obviously) but it sure as hell seems like executives ought to go to jail a LOT more than they do. Corporations do terrible things in the world and are seemingly never held to account.
Finally, looking to my own education, can you suggest a place to read up on this topic so I am not flatly wrong in the future? Thx in advance :)
> So why then does it seem that corporations do in fact shield executives from criminal charges? Is this just collusion among the well-off? Money buys verdicts?
Misinformation, propaganda, urban legends, etc.
> but it sure as hell seems like executives ought to go to jail a LOT more than they do.
Based on what? Which executives are you talking about, and what crimes do you suspect them of?
> Corporations do terrible things in the world and are seemingly never held to account.
Again, what "terrible things" are you talking about, and what level of accountability do you see lacking in the way existing police forces, regulatory agencies, and the courts respond to their behavior?
> Finally, looking to my own education, can you suggest a place to read up on this topic so I am not flatly wrong in the future?
I'd start with any basic intro-level textbook on business law.
Before you start, given the extent to which your previous comments indicate you're relying on how things feel or seem to you, I'd recommend considering the extent to which you are reading your own assumptions and emotional attachments into your perceptions of the outside world, and the extent to which you're relying on echo chambers and biased sources of information to validate your theories and assumptions.
Laymen here: my guess would be that the financial and social resources corporate representatives have access to (both personally and through the entity that has a vested interest in them not going to jail) make the prospect of prosecuting them for criminal misconduct unappetizing. It would be a lot of time and money to send people with a lot of powerful friends to jail for a handful of years, at best. As a prosecutor, what's better for your career: that, or spending significantly fewer resources putting street-level criminals in prison for 5, 10, 20 years?
The issues at hand seem distinct but related.
Before trying to explain why you think business executives aren't being prosecuted for criminal conduct, can you first point to a reliable source of data that indicates that this is actually happening, and isn't just a myth reinforced by online echo chambers?
Anecdotally, most of the large corporate scandals that involved actual criminal conduct that I'm aware of did result in prosecutions and, often, convictions of the culpable parties. For example, Jeffrey Skilling, Bernie Madoff, and Elizabeth Holmes all went to jail.
2008 happened.
You could also just look for examples of officials trying to explain why they won't bring charges against banking officials.
https://financialservices.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx...
https://www.propublica.org/article/why-havent-bankers-been-p...
https://www.npr.org/2011/07/13/137789065/why-prosecutors-don...
I should state that this reply is mostly for other people reading our comment thread, as I can think of no adult American who would present your argument in good faith.
Why can't both of those be true? I don't see any contradiction between them. The law doesn't seem to have any issue taking them both as true either. Corporations are considered their own entity under the law, but they do not enjoy all the rights of people. The whole reason this story is making headlines instead of being a humdrum "dog bites man" event is because corporations typically do not have the right to vote, even though people mostly do.
Those people can already vote. I have no idea what your point is.
The contradiction clears up when you realize that corporations are legal fiction without rights, merely privileges granted to them.
You can act in your capacity as a person and exercise your rights, taking on personal liability.
You can act via a fictive legal proxy, which has no rights and shield yourself from some liability.
Trying to blur those two is madness.
No, but the people who own and control the corporation all do.
They can vote and act in their capacity as people. They can fuck off otherwise.
The problem is voting has historically been limited to, real, living things. This has inherently limited the total amount of votes cast and where.
Corporations are an artificial entity that literally anyone can make. Even things like property ownership are somewhat artificial. Lots can generally be split and joined through a process.
This allowance of artificial entities voting seems to open a rabbit hole of secondary issues.
> ... they won’t want rich people to vote.
I think it might be more than that
If the corporation is just a proxy for the owners then why is this in court? Why aren't the humans just voting directly? It's well established that it's OK for humans to vote.
Because the municipal charter in question confers to vote on the property owner. Which might technically be a corporation.
The question is, why did they bother to take it to court instead of just transferring ownership directly to their persons and then voting as humans? If corporations are just proxies then why bother with the lawyers and the court fees and the time?
Because they want the other benefits of the corporate form. Why should they have to choose between the benefits of the corporate structure and exercising the rights the municipality has given property owners?
> Why should they have to choose between the benefits of the corporate structure and exercising the rights the municipality has given property owners?
Why shouldn't they?
They're trading one benefit for another.
The individual house owners don't get all the benefits of an LLC for similar reasons.
> They're trading one benefit for another
Why? What’s the logical basis for this idea that they should have to choose between these benefits?
What's the logical basis for this idea that LLCs should have more benefits than an individual homeowner but give up nothing in return?
Because corporations aren't people. Full stop.
To the extent that is relevant to law and ethics, they are. Juridical people, as it goes.
They're not, and the terminology shouldn't be confused. "Juridical people" tries to sneak in priors about what "people" means.
People, of course, have rights. Corporations are not people, including "juridical people". They are legal fiction with absolutely no rights. Every action they take is permission granted to them by the people.
You have it backwards. As you acknowledged elsewhere, "juridical people" is an abstraction over a group of people. To be more precise, a collective acting towards a unified goal (with a set of norms binding them together).
Even the naive perspective over this recognizes that the corporation has "rights" by being proxies of their constituents, so you are correct in saying "Every action they take is permission granted to them by the people."
However, a more careful analysis recognizes that the exercised rights of a corp comes from a combination of the rights of its members, often in intermingled way (due to binding norms of the corp) that doesn't map directly into a singular individual. As such, it's common to abstract it as the "rights of the corporation". You can look at the individual rights (sometimes you have to), but that's like looking at humans by their individual cells. Certainly doable, but cumbersome most of the time.
Also, I find the phrase "They are legal fiction with absolutely no rights" funny. As if rights weren't legal fiction themselves. Not that this means much either, ethics and law are about "what ought to be done", and that's - objectively - as fictional as you can get.
You're confusing them again, which is why sneaking in priors with the term "people" is bad. "granted to them by the people" means "We The People", society, etc, not the people in control of the legal fiction.
> being proxies of their constituents
These proxies have no rights. People can exercise their rights as people. Or, they can create legal fictions with no rights. That legal fiction inherits no rights from the owners, which is where the analogy fails. There's no intermingling/combination/whatever to call "rights", because there's nothing.
Every action that legal fiction takes is a permission granted to it by society that continues to tolerate its existence. That tolerance is finite. When that tolerance ends, so does the legal fiction's existence. Unlike with people, there are no moral quandaries with revoking the privilege of existence.
Rights being inherent to people is an interesting but separate topic. We've generally agreed as a society that people have rights.
That's a lot of statements, so I'll dissect them.
> People can exercise their rights as people. Or, they can create legal fictions with no rights.
How exactly do you think they can create these legal fictions? Through their rights. That's how corporations inherit them. Keep in mind I'm not focusing on LLCs, but the more broader concept, that also includes an organized society under a common set of rules.
> There's no intermingling/combination/whatever to call "rights", because there's nothing.
There's clearly something, as "Microsoft" and "Google" are distinct entities. To imply there's nothing is to imply there's no difference.
> Every action that legal fiction takes is a permission granted to it by society that continues to tolerate its existence.
Who is "society" here? Everyone? Clearly not, or else this trial would not have reached this conclusion while others complain in the internet about its results. Generally, it refers to a group of people bound by a set of rules (the constituion, laws, etc.), i.e. a corporation. So it's a bit funny that a legal fiction decides whether other legal fictions exist.
> Rights being inherent to people is an interesting but separate topic.
We are in a discussion about whether corporations have rights or not. It ultimately will touch on the source of rights and where they are derived from.
> We've generally agreed as a society that people have rights.
Which doesn't do much against rights being legal fiction. Or corporations having rights.
I'm also focused on the broader principle, not just specifically any one structure such as LLCs.
I have the legal right as a person to write on a piece of paper "i am a person". That piece of paper does not inherit any rights by my doing so.
Me writing "Microsoft" on one paper and "Google" on another paper certainly means that those two pieces of paper are distinct. Neither one, however, has rights.
What I meant by intermingling/combination/whatever is that, there are no rights to inherit, because a piece of paper has no rights, inherited or otherwise. That includes intermingled rights of people. People may have complex intermingled rights on certain subjects. That is not applicable to legal fictions, because they don't have rights and can't inherit rights.
I think it will become clear as you picture the silly idea of writing "I'm a piece of paper and I have rights" and then expecting that to mean anything. Work backwards from there.
Is the piece of paper a collective of people? Does the piece of paper have agents to enact the decisions of its rulling body? You seem to be forgetting the primary reason why corporations have rights in this perspective.
There's, objectively, an intermingling of rights happening inside an corporation, which derives directly from the "under a normative instrument" part of the definition of a corporation, which creates legal interactions between the rights of the members. That's simply a fact.
And, again, may I remind you, "rights", "laws", "norms", etc. are legal fiction. They don't have an actual corporeal body. Arguably, corporations have more of one given that they have agents, and the actions they do, on behalf of the corporation, is very material.
Hold up. Law, OK, partially. But ethics? What ethical framework treats corporations as people?
The one that backs the law, for instance. But, more broadly, corporations, specially ones ruled by shareholders/contracts, tend to have a will of their own, and "people" in ethics is more about will and desire than biology.
It's a dangerous game to anthropomorphize legal fictions by using terms like attributing "will" to them. Likewise by sneaking in priors with the term "people". It's best to stick to calling them legal fiction.
It might help to picture them as literally a piece of paper. It would be pretty silly to say that piece of paper has a "will of its own" or "rights" or calling it a "person", wouldn't it?
If I scribble "i am a person" on a piece of paper, it's still just a piece of paper. If I get a bunch of people to join in and scribble something on the same piece of paper, it's still just a piece of paper. There's no confusion over "rights" or "will". It's a piece of paper.
The usage of the term "will" isn't unwarranted nor simply an anthropomorphization for the sake of it. Long story short, it's the recognition that both individuals and corps (through their agents, not to be confused by their members) can enter into conflict. A legal conflict can only emerge between entities that have a "will". This isn't something I ascribed onto them, this is something I observed in them given the definitions I'm working with. I suspect our conflict lies in them.
The anthropomorphization simply emerges out of a shared property in this context. Keep in mind I haven't said anything about biology.
What is "the one that backs the law"?
I don't buy it at all. For example, it's generally considered to be unethical to kill a person aside from limited circumstances such as self defense. Killing a person because they're no longer useful to you is Right Out in every ethical framework I've ever heard of. Are you implying that dissolving a corporation is unethical?
> What is "the one that backs the law"?
Depends on each jurisdiction. You'd have to look at which frameworks informed the laws that back each corporation.
On the topic of corporate dissolution, I see less as killing and more as natural death. When a corp dissolves in accordance to its norms and general ethics (or the jurisdiction it's under, at least), that's equivalent to someone naturally dying. The constituents no longer wish to participate and follow the binding rules that define the corp to dissolve it, enacting its "will", if you will (pun intended).
Something akin to murder would be a "hostile take over into a dissolution" situation, where a rogue member decides to unilaterally dissolve the corp in defiance of the other members despite having no legal justification, neither in the binding norms of the corp nor in their personal rights (although that's generally implied, as, in theory, no contract can violate this). I think we can agree that the latter case would indeed be unethical, if not illegal.
Also, killing people strictly because they are not useful to you is covered by a "rule by might" ethics framework. Not one I agree with, but it exists.
Why would it be a natural death when it's destroyed by another person?
Really this comes down to sloppy usage of words. You said the phrase yourself: "juridical people." You need that qualifier on it, "juridical," to distinguish from actual human beings. Because they're not the same. "Corporations are people" -> corporations are legal entities that share some of the same rights, privileges, and responsibilities as human beings. "Corporations aren't people" -> corporations are a distinct concept from human beings, including ethically and legally.
Legally, the argument comes down to how precise you're being. Is there an implied qualifier? Is the statement meant to convey that corporations are legally the same as natural persons (they aren't) or just that they are some sort of legal entity? And the whole dispute here is because people are interpreting it differently.
To rephrase the comment some replies above: "Because corporations aren't natural people."
All the discussion about corporate personhood is off the mark, because corporate personhood only means that corporations have some of the rights that natural persons have, and voting is not generally among them. Although apparently it is in one town in Delaware.
Because the another personin question is one the constituents acting in behalf of the corporation itself. Perhaps it's closer to suicide, but still, it's not just "another person", but, in a sense, a part of the corporation itself.
I think the dispute is more about interpretation. Ultimately, what I've shown is more of a perspective (one I believe it's useful due to the legal interplay of rights that happen inside), but one can just look at corporations by looking at their members, agents and the rules they've agreed prior and I suspect it would be equivalent to treating corporations as real people, presuming jusnaturalism.
Given that voting is a right currently derived from a more juspositivistic perspective, the justifications behind who's considered a "natural person" and who gets to vote are pretty arbitrary.
Which is why elsewhere I make the argument that we should strongly reject the terminology of "people" in any relation to corporations. It leads people down bad mental thought processes by sneaking in priors.
Corporations are not "X people". Corporations are not people, period. Natural people are just people.
I had the same logic as you previously, actually. But, eventually, I realized the terminology is not as misleading as it appears.
Try defining what is "people". What is "natural people". Why do "natural people" have "rights". What is a "corporation". How does a "corporation" differ from any other legal fiction. So on.
because the city of Fenwick Island decided it wanted to set things up a different way, the ACLU challenged, and the judge said the city can it up how they want to.
The question is not what the law says (the headline is sufficient to understand that), but why people are doing this at all. If corporations are just proxies for their owners, then owners who want a vote could just own the property in their own name rather than their corporation's and problem solved. There is some reason they don't do this. I want rayiner to spell it out for me, because that "a corporation is just a proxy" line is 100% horseshit.
> If corporations are just proxies for their owners, then owners who want a vote could just own the property in their own name rather than their corporation's and problem solved
Exactly! They could do that, so the law shouldn’t treat the two situations differently. You just proved my point, not yours.
> There is some reason they don't do this
I’m sure they have many reasons. But that doesn’t change the fact that the corporation is a proxy for people.
Your real argument seems to be that you think people should have to choose between exercising their rights and having the protections of the corporate form.
"Protections of the corporate form"? You mean they aren't just proxies?
The fact that the corporate form has other benefits doesn’t mean that the corporations aren’t proxies for the purposes relevant here.
Likewise, the fact that corporations act as proxies in some ways doesn't mean that they must act as proxies for votes.
Obviously, the court has ruled that they do in fact act that way. But we're talking about what should be, not what is.
The question of whether corporate owners of residences should be able to vote in this town is not at all obvious, certainly doesn't merit dismissal with a glib "corporations are just proxies." They aren't just proxies. In some respects they are, in others they aren't. If they were nothing but proxies then there'd be no point to them.
Got ‘em!
> I want rayiner to spell it out for me, because that "a corporation is just a proxy" line is 100% horseshit.
Not the original author, but generically, there are a few reasons why one would place a residential property in a distinct legal entity.
Most commonly it's to shield a property against others - spouses, children or other relatives with legal inheritance claims, especially if the jurisdiction in question treats corporate ownership more favorably to the goal of the person in question than they treat real estate ownership. In some cases, cough Rene Benko, the aim is to have a corporate veil against the government or creditors, although more commonly a trust is the chosen vehicle instead of a corporation.
The other way around is rare, but also works - the legal entity caps your exposure. Think of, say, your house catches fire due to shoddy electrical works. Some dumbass neighbor kid climbs over a fence, drowns in your pool and is barely rescued in time, but their brain is now fried for good and the kid will need 80 years in intensive assisted living. You own your home outright? All of your other wealth can be seized now to make the neighbors whole. However, if a LLC owns that home, your exposure is now limited to the value of the home - the LLC goes bankrupt, the house is sold off with the proceeds going to the neighbors, you can keep the rest of your wealth.
Right. And maybe in exchange for that, you don't get a non-resident vote anymore. That doesn't sound outrageous to me. If the LLC were a pure proxy then none of these advantages would apply. It makes sense that there might be some tradeoffs involved.
The problem is corporations mostly don't have the same interests in communities as people and they are motivated by other concerns that can run counter to the good of society. So yea.
Setting aside the corporation part, is there precedent for allowing people to vote in multiple residences? In my experience, when you register to vote in one location you are no longer allowed to vote where you were previously registered, regardless of how many places you own houses. Some places cross-reference voter registrations to enforce this, and others don't really check, but it has been the rule everywhere I have lived.
"Corporations are controlled by humans, therefore critics are motivated by anti-rich sentiment" is definitely a take
Where did the "therefore" come from? From OP's comment it didn't, that's for sure.
When I hear people grouse about the concept corporate rights, I always ask them why they hate New York Times _Co._ v. Sullivan.
And they scratch your head and say "but... that ruling applies to regular people, like NYT staff and you and me."
It simply sets a high standard for proving defamation claims by public figures.
“NYT” staff don’t publish the paper, the corporation does.
Irrelevant.
New York Times Co. v. Sullivan - and the First Amendment it draws upon - applies to everyone, regardless of what corporation they may or may not work for. An unemployed person is protected from defamation claims by public figures under it just fine.
It does not establish any special corporate rights.
Sullivan absolutely establishes corporate rights. Otherwise, Trump could enact a ban on “fake news” and say it applies only to the corporation itself, not the staff. The staff can write whatever they want, but the corporation can’t use its printing presses, etc., to disseminate what the government considers fake news.
> Otherwise, Trump could enact a ban on “fake news” and say it applies only to the corporation itself, not the staff.
That's some really tortured logic.
Such an act would simply be a violation of the First Amendment (and Article I, for that matter). The corporate nature of its target is, again, entirely irrelevant.
Sullivan sets a high standard for defamation claims by public figures. That's it. They protect you saying defamatory things about Hillary Clinton as long as you don't write down "I know this is false and I'm defaming her because I hate her guts" explicitly somewhere.
> The corporate nature of its target is, again, entirely irrelevant.
Why? In New York Times v. Sullivan, the corporation was being sued for what it did. The New York Times reporter didn’t print and distribute all those newspapers. The corporation did that.
And what you’re calling “tortured logic” was in fact the government’s argument in Citizens United. It argued that it wasn’t regulating the filmmaker. It was regulating the corporation spending funds to make and distribute the film. So it sounds like we agree Citizens United was correctly decided!
> In New York Times v. Sullivan, the corporation was being sued for what it did.
And its status as a corporation was irrelevant to the result. If it was @ceejayoz v. Sullivan, the ruling would've been the same.
> So it sounds like we agree Citizens United was correctly decided!
There's that torturing again. I believe CU illegitimately impacts the voting rights of American citizens.
... and if they own 50 houses, each through a separate LLC, they can vote 50 times, even if they do not in fact even live in the area.
... and you can probably come up with a legal way to permanently bind a corporation to vote according to specific rules.
... and larger corporations have totally inhuman internal decision making processes that frequently arrive at conclusions no human would reach.
This is an impressively awful take, congratulations.
Corporations aren't people and don't have rights or votes.
If you want to have a say in the way a place is run, you can do so in your capacity as a person.
If you want to do so from a legal fiction "proxy", fuck off.
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To save everyone some trouble, "some Delaware elections" refers to elections in a town that amended its charter to explicitly allow legal entities to vote.
More accurately: the town charter allows non-residents to vote if they own property on the island, even if the property is owned through a corporation.
Thanks!
I have no problem with individual jurisdictions controlling how their domestic-chartered companies operate/speak/vote — particularly with the recent Hawai'ian example: [in attempts of] reversing Citizens United, by removing political speech from corporate entities. Bravo, Hawaii.
This ruling is the exact opposite of the recent proposal from Hawaii.
That ruling is predicated on the state having control over corporations and how they behave. This ruling in Delaware is affirming a clear path for corporations to have control over the state (county, city etc).
With this ruling, it affirms a corporations ability to form air tight rule over municipal governments and operate them as they see fit. Once a corporation manufactures a majority vote in this municipality, they can then amend any rules they see fit, install their own executive leadership and have removed any corporate control over it.
In the thin sense these are both jurisdictions controlling how corporations behave, but one cedes complete control to corporations and the other vastly limits a corporation's ability to exert political control.
>This ruling is the exact opposite of the recent proposal from Hawaii.
Understood, but state-control of corporate charters (in both cases) is the underlying enabler.
>In the thin sense these are both jurisdictions controlling how corporations behave, but one cedes complete control to corporations and the other vastly limits a corporation's ability to exert political control.
My original claim is that states ought'a have Tenth Amendment Rights – no? – what they do with it also ought'a be up to their homerulings.
----
Personally, I support Hawaii's newfound corporate speech limitation.
> Personally, I support Hawaii's newfound corporate speech limitation.
Couldn't agree more!
My point is that it is the same underlying power, but one is using the power to maintain and grow powers over corps, the other using the same power to cede it.
You can register a corporation in Delaware for $109.
The Town of Fenwick Island mentioned here has a population of 400.
It's high noon for this matter, & about time to start repealing corporate rights. The undoing of this travesty should be a federal project. But hopefully Delaware can course correct themselves, and reverse the mega-threat to humanity they have been unleashing. At least states like Hawaii are heading in the opposite direction already, saying corporations are not people and denying them human speech rights. Potentially immortal easy to spawn companies should indeed not be granted full human rights. https://inequality.org/article/hawaii-targets-citizens-unite...
Doing this at scale might be even cheaper than that. A Delaware Series LLC is $300/year, which then lets you make an unlimited number of independent legal entities. You don't even have to file paperwork with the state to create these new entities, just your own internal bookkeeping. Although presumably you'd have to file paperwork to transfer them a tiny sliver of real estate ($$), register to vote (free), and to actually vote (free).
So I buy one parcel of land and then split off ownership to each of the 400 entities I created? Crazy
The original complaint cites no minimum land ownership requirement and the judgement does not seem to make specific disagreement with this fact as best I can tell, so that is my understanding as well.
I have to imagine that's an OpenClaw workflow by now.
The state of Hawaii was the most recent to be expropriated from its natives at the behest of corporate landlords, so they're probably a bit raw about it.
Having corporations be distinct entities whose investors have limited liability is a pretty fundamental to a lot of things. But voting? That is way too far.
If a corporation owns property somewhere but none of its owners actually live there, the corporation itself still obviously has an interest in local governance. It sounds like this locality has decided that property ownership qualfies the owner to a vote. Not all the investors in that corporation get to vote, rather the corporate entity, as a singular thing, gets one vote.
One can imagine all kinds of abusive scenarios with shell corporations created just to get votes, but sounds like the judge thought that these imaginary scenarios were not demonstrated to be actually happening. Courts typically rule only on demonstrated harm or other actual evidence, not "what if" conjectures.
I think I'm just gonna repost this recent link here... https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler...
I hope we can agree that allowing corporations to vote in any kind of political process is taking corporate personhood too far
I absolutely agree. They shouldn't be able to vote and they shouldn't have free speech rights. Corporations are a legal structure - a way to allow risk sharing to encourage investment that would otherwise maybe not happen if one had to risk everything in order to invest. But when we choose to allow that, and it is a choice, we should not give those entities the rights of people. It is simply absurd.
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Because owning a corporation becomes a way for you to vote twice, once on your own behalf, once on behalf of your corporation.
This seems like an obvious problem
Then it wouldn't be a big deal to change that charter, right? Right? Right? Of course, if the actual locals are bothered by it - not us on the internet with exactly zero dogs in that fight.
The charter in question has allowed non-resident voting since the 1950s.
If I own property in multiple municipalities/states, then I should be able to vote in all of them on local issues.
Absolutely not. If you don’t live there, then your vote shouldn’t matter as much as someone who does live there.
that's a different legal question than the one here.
This case is specifically about allowing voting for non-resident property owners when the ownership is held by a corporation rather than a natural person.
correct. and the comment I replied to is about allowing voting for non-resident property owners when the ownership IS held by a natural person.
The poster did not indicate how they hold their ownership. Many people hold their real estate indirectly; a trust is common; if I read the opiniom correctly, a majority of properties in the municipality in question are held in trust.
Why?
Nice assertion. No. You should be able to vote where you live. Full stop. Nothing else. You don't get more than one vote.
What about the notion of No Taxation without Representation? With that in mind, shouldn't you get to vote wherever you are (substantially) taxed?
Corporations don't have the right of representation, because corporations don't have rights. People have rights, and corporations are not people.
No. One person, one vote, with registration tied to where you live.
Now, to discuss No Taxation Without Representation: we haven’t had proper representation since the number of representatives in the house was capped because we ran out of space for more chairs, so personally I consider that ship has sailed. I would love to get back to a place where We The People had representation. Alas we do not. Let’s start by addressing the absolutely absurd chair problem.
Yeah that would be good to address too. I wonder if we'd end up with vertically stacked Representatives like in Star Wars.
Well, if we're going to go all Star Wars with it, let's elect some kids to office. Smart kids. Kids with a sense of justice and fairness. But yes, I expect a sphere might be the best layout. Like King Arthur's Round Table, there is no head or foot.
all corporations ultimately resolve down to individuals. either the shareholders or the board.
The point of an limited liability company is to limit that aspect substantially.
I don't understand how this thread went from something like #10 on the main page down to #186 in a matter of an hour, despite being more active than most of the threads it is competing with. Can someone more familiar with HN rankings explain this one to me?
Submissions with too many comments for their votes receive a penalty. This is to stop flame wars.
I suppose that could make sense. It's still rather unfortunate, as this is a concerning development that could probably use some more awareness around it.
This system was designed decades ago "To stop flamewars" and not been changed or fixed or improved in any way despite a drastically changing internet and world.
The purpose of a system is what it does, especially when chances to change or improve that system are ignored.
Similarly, HN is for "interesting discussion" which is why "politics is banned" even though it is explicitly not because the one time we tried to literally ban politics it was self evident how stupid, unworkable, and self defeating of a policy it is, and it lead to zero "interesting discussion", but whatever hype fad is popular right now fills the entire board to capacity at all times, with nothing more than the standard talking points either way, and somehow the 37th post about "AI slop but by a different Substack account nobody has heard of before" is interesting discussion.
"Too many comments for their votes", which is not made transparent to us because god forbid we understand why things happen in our community.
Corporate representation in UNO when?
This reads like satire from a Slate commentary piece on Citizens United. I suppose we’re just waiting around until the majority of corporations in the US are formed and operated by AI agents. And then…
ofc it’s Fenwick Island - it’s a mix of brainrot tourons and “tread on me harder daddy” closeted republicans.
Source: local
"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others".
Most corporations in the US are legalized mafias. Well, and in Spain and the rest of Europe, almost literally, with bribes and such. Don't ever talk about some practices from El Corte Inglés, La Liga, estate companies, construction sections and tourism and the like. Basically we don't have proper remote working "thanks" to the construction and estate lobbies.
And from media/TV corpos, ahem... Mediaset and Atresmedia, there have been internal wars too. Sometimes even with death threats.
And as I said, not just Spain. Germany, France, the Netherlands, even Iceland has tons of shaddy corporate stuff.
Do you know what you get when corporates do what they want with no consecuences? The South of Italy. Because I'm pretty sure the North of Italy it's a gem... polished with the misery of shaddy business from the South.
For sure they must be tons of money laundering down there. Ditto with some barber shops, smartphone cover/case shops, some laundries, kebabs, TONs of bars and pubs in Spain. I have more than 10 bars around me in less than 100 meters around. Think about it, all of them can't be as profitable except for a major main street where everyone hangs out. On average 1 in 10 or 20 bars in around must be selling more than spirits...
If the common folk has to this to survive, just imagine what a billion based corporation could be doing. And the CEO's, welll... pure psychos and OFC with the profiles you would find around Epstein, and not just with pedophilic tendencies -which is power related, not sex-. The small CEO's will resort to cocaine and night clubs with prostitutes. The big ones... just run away from these people. Seriously.
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Same question. So someone rich can spin up shell companies to steer elections hmm...
Or several companies with the same interest in mind voted for something good for the companies, bad for individuals.
Do you care enough about the local governance of the Town of Fenwick Island to do this?
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Incorrect - this is southern delaware homie. While the northern portions enjoy the storied histories of great Delawareans like Harriett Tubman, the rest is a mix of that and some who’d prefer a more sterile white future.
41% of Delaware voters picked Trump in 2024.
Per https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2024_United_States_P..., Fenwick Island itself went red (the absolute bottom-right-most spot).
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You asserted "Everyone in this story is a Democrat".
That seems unlikely, given the town is a red precinct.
No one said anything about Trump's fault, just that there are clearly people and entire regions in Delaware who vote Republican. Look how red that map is - plenty of Republicans in local government.
It's a low effort partisan comment, but "Republicans" generally represent the naked corporate agenda (bad cop) while the "Democrats" at least try to hide it and throw the People some concessions (good cop).
Except we’re talking about Delaware, which is totally controlled by Democrats who also cater to corporations.
Don't play coy. We are obviously talking about the overall national political landscape, extrapolating from this one development to its part in a larger trend. The specific politics of Delaware (which team is the incumbent and how the state is openly corporate friendly) don't change that.
My point is that the example you’ve chosen to highlight is a major counter example that undermines your broader narrative.
I haven't highlighted anything here. I actually characterized the original comment as a "low effort partisan comment".
This development is also not a counter example - Both parties routinely do the bidding of corporate entrenched interests, but they market it in different ways. So an instance of Democrats advancing the corporatist agenda isn't some gotcha like you're making it out to be.
Though perhaps by "undermine" you just mean it's something for other partisans to latch onto to support their own rationalizations rather than coming to terms with that "broader narrative".
> Karsnitz dismissed the lawsuit from Delaware’s Superior Court, citing “the principle of one person/entity/one vote.”
What? The principle is "one person, one vote". I'd like to cite the principle of "one person, one vote, unless they're named recursivecaveat in which case 1 trillion votes" to assert my rights in the Fenwick island elections please.
> Visions of faceless large corporations or even HAL controlling a small town are frightening and the stuff of science fiction
The City of London and Hong Kong have half of the voting power held by corporations and City of London is older than any US state, and colony. And so are some of the guilds
Universal suffrage at all, and exclusive to natural persons, is more science fiction than corporations voting
https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/about-us/voting-elections/bu...
Gives more details on the ability of companies to vote in City of London elections.
This seems disingenuous. The City of London and Hong Kong being "corporations". They're still nations. It's like Pennsylvania arguing that it's a Commonwealth and not a state. When people do not have equal representation under the law the people are not free. We call it authoritarianism.
Fascinating news for you is that nobody is saying any of those things.
I said, and factually, that voting power is held by corporations within those states, just like within this town in Delaware. Nothing to do with what you wrote about semantics of the state’s own incorporation reality or fiction
One of the interesting patterns for suffrage has been that it doesn't matter.
Before Great Reform the vast majority of British people can't vote, after it all the moderately wealthy men can now vote. So did that result in massive political change, reflecting the newly enfranchised people's preferences? Nope. Subsequent tinkering expanded suffrage slightly but again, the results were the same. Then last century they did several things in quick succession (often portrayed as "universal suffrage" but as we'll see that's just what people always call any expansion, the "universe" of one's imagination grows). First they gave all men (including poor men), and older women suffrage. This made no appreciable difference except that, having now entertained the idea that women should vote (it wasn't technically illegal before Great Reform it just didn't happen enough to matter) the women realised hey, maybe women should be politicians and that did cause some modest changes. Then they equalised voting age for men and women, so now a 21 year old can vote regardless of gender.
Later in that century the UK gave almost† all 18 year olds the vote too, and again the worry was maybe a 19 year old will vote differently? Nope. More or less the same results.
So, maybe giving corporations the vote changes nothing, but I'm less hopeful than I was for giving Sarah, an 18 year living with her parents on benefits the vote knowing that for some insane reason she's not actually much more likely to vote against a "Fuck Sarah, take her money away" policy than everybody else is because apparently all people are morons so giving more of them suffrage changed nothing. I think corporations are psychopaths not morons...
† Although most crooks in the UK aren't magically stopped from voting, they can't vote in prison and in practice it's very hard to vote from prison even if it would be legal for you because you're held there prior to a trial or whatever. So that's not ideal. It is controversial whether specific electoral interference crimes should result in withdrawal of suffrage, as is the practice today or whether that's just petty and ultimately futile.
[[ I still support universal suffrage, but because now it's everybody's fault. You're not going to get a good government, but now the terrible government is your fault too. ]]
The problem with companies being treated like people is that they are only afforded the -good- aspects and not the -bad- ones. This is an out for the rich to become 'more equal' by owning companies and having expanded rights that the average person doesn't. If this is really just a delegation of rights then fine. One vote, one person that is actually eligible, and not by right of them owning that company, for that vote explicitly delegates that one instance of that right. Same with campaign finance and all the other 'good parts' companies are getting without the bad parts. If these companies really are people then why aren't they actually being thrown in jail when they commit crimes? Why aren't they on death row when they kill people for money? Rights without responsibility and repercussions is tyranny since -some actual person- is now forced to feel that responsibility and the repercussions that this company pushed off.