Spiritual Economics

Corporations Are Persons - NOT!

The Economics of Atheism Would Have Us Believe That 

Corporations Are Real, Necessary and Beneficial

(The following is an excerpt from my book "Lessons in Spiritual Economics") 

The corporation has been a tool for the profit of some by the efforts of others since its inception and remains so to this day. Special privileges were granted by the King of England to form the East India Company and the Hudson Bay Company so that the shareholders, primarily the King, could enjoy the profits generated by these ventures. Corporations continue to enjoy privileges not available to an individual person for the same reasons. Chief among these privileges are favorable tax structures, or no taxes at all; the anonymity provided to both the owners, and managers who act not in their own name, but in the name of the corporation; and separation of the owners and workers by means of a management structure, preventing the workers from taking action directly and personally against the owners in cases of disagreements over working conditions, pay scales, and so on. Corporations are an extension of the social engineering that began in the 15th century in the transition toward the economics of ignorance.

Corporations are an illusion of modern society because they have no existence in fact. They are a fiction agreed to by those who hold power; the rest of us merrily go along with the established order as we do with the other fictions, accepting them as a given fact of life. But they are not a fact of life. We think of them as reality because we have been acculturated to do this from the time we were children, and they simply become a part of things that “are”. Some “out-of-the-box” thinkers such as futurist Buckminster Fuller have understood the game for what it is. In The Grunch of Giants he explains: “Corporations are neither physical nor metaphysical phenomena. They are socioeconomic ploys—legally enacted game-playing—agreed upon only between overwhelmingly powerful socioeconomic individuals and by them imposed upon human society and all of its unwitting members.”

Given the nature and purpose of the corporation it is one of the pillars of the economics of atheism. If the idea of atheism is to forget God, to allow us to think of ourselves as God, that is, to be a law unto ourselves, then the creation of corporations can be seen as an effort of people to act as if they were God. They think: God creates and destroys. So can we. God grants life and brings death. So can we. God creates eternal beings with qualities that transcend normal reality, and so can we? In the creation of corporations we do. The creation of a corporation can even be seen as a material attempt to create a spiritual being. Compare them: the spirit soul is a non-material, eternal entity, and the corporation is a non-material, eternal entity (they have no expiration). The soul should live in a state of bliss with no effort expended to achieve that state, while the corporation delivers unearned profits with no effort expended by the owner so that he can have material bliss (as in Robert Nelson’s idea of heaven). If the atma is eternal and transcendental to all material considerations, the corporation is also a supernal entity beyond many laws that apply to most ordinary people. Corporations can also be seen as an effort to become the Supersoul by being in many places at once and having many people act in “their interest” simultaneously.  Just as God creates and gives us a body, the word corporation implies a body, since it is derived from the Latin corpus, which means body, or corporātus, to make into a body.

Artificial Persons Rise Above Real Persons

Early in the history of corporations in the United States (nineteenth century and earlier) corporations were highly regulated and it was not uncommon for corporate charters to be revoked when they adversely impacted the common welfare. It was illegal for corporations to participate in the political process—corporations couldn’t vote, and neither were they allowed to try to influence votes. It was illegal for corporations to lie about their products, and their books and processes were required to be open to government inspectors. Both the States and the Federal Government were able to investigate if workers were harmed or hazardous conditions created.

The tycoons of business found these conditions too confining. They wanted to be free to act as they pleased, and sought the ways and means of doing so. The answer came with the victory of the north over the south at the end of the civil war. Then in 1868 the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution was enacted to provide full constitutional protection of law to the now-emancipated former slaves. By this and the Thirteenth Amendment all human beings were to be recognized as real persons, independent citizens, and not the property or chattel of another person.

At that time the railroads were the greatest corporations and they sought to take advantage of these amendments and repeatedly sued various states, counties, and towns in which they argued that corporations were artificially created persons and entitled to the same privileges and protection of law that natural persons enjoyed. For example, they claimed that they were being treated as different “classes of persons” because different railroad properties were being taxed in different ways in different places, and that this constituted illegal discrimination under the Fourteenth Amendment. Need we point out that this argument has no basis in fact? What exactly is an “artificial person?” Has anybody ever seen one? There is no such thing in reality and the effort to impose this idea on us is nothing more than an effort to hoodwink us into accepting illusion as reality. To their credit they have been very successful.

They continued their legal assault for some twenty years reaching a zenith in 1877 when four cases were brought to the Supreme Court attempting to achieve corporate personhood. In each of these cases, the Court ruled that the railroad’s arguments pertained to interstate commerce which was not applicable to the Fourteenth Amendment; therefore the courts would not rule that corporations were persons.

But in 1886, with a sleight of hand so characteristic of Kali, that victory was achieved in another tax issue: the Santa Clara County versus The Union Pacific Railroad. The victory came not by the decision of the judges, but simply by the notation of a court clerk J. C. Bancroft Davis, who happened to be the former president of a small railroad. Davis wrote into his headnote, which is a commentary that clerks write about each case, that the Chief Justice had said that all the Justices agreed that corporations are persons. He wrote this although he knew that the justices had not ruled on that specific issue in the case.10 This headnote had no legal standing but was accepted as such by later judges under the color of law.

But corporations are not ordinary persons. They don’t die, they possess the non-human ability to be in many places at the same time, they increasingly have the ability to avoid liability, given their economic clout they can define the laws under which they live, they don’t pay taxes as ordinary people do, and they have shown themselves to have little sense of moral responsibility, with many being recidivist criminals.

Let me back that up with several examples. As far as influencing the laws that pertain to them, over the past 30 years the automobile industry has endeavored to block legislation that would impose criminal penalties on pre-meditated and willful violations of the federal auto safety laws. The result is that only civil fines are imposed and few, if any, executives, making decisions that affect the lives of people are indicted and convicted for their morally irresponsible actions.  ... Get the book here.