Social liberals have been pushing for same-sex marriage and for overturning Citizens United, (corporations are people) for quite a while now, without a whole lot of success. I had an idea that would turn everything on its head, and address many of the issues with these stances.
What if, instead of awarding inclusive rights to specific people, or excluding rights from non-individual groups, we treat everyone and all legal entities the same. Lets make everyone part of a corporation. No more marriages, unions, sole proprietorships, partnerships or families. Lets make all legal entities the same, a corporation. A corporation would consist of zero or more people and share the same tax burden and criminal responsibility that corporations do now. Voting would be turned over to your corporation, which would have as many votes as its constituent people. Criminal punishment would be similarly dolled out to the corporation as a whole, with every member responsible for serving it.
Other complicated laws that would go away include inheritance, shared property, parental custody, and insurance. All sorts of stuff would be made very simple.
Of course anyone who wants to remain an individual could be a corporation of one, but families in any number or form could become tight communes with shared property, insurance, and legal protections. Small groups could then belong to larger corporations as umbrella structures, just like current corporate monopolies do now.
The point of a corporation is protect its owners from liability and to make normal business risk more manageable. What makes it hard to swallow about how they function now, is that while people don’t have any of those protections in life, a corporation’s owners, in their wealth, get all sorts of protections and tax benefits. At the core of letting corporations spread into the realm of people-hood is that its unfair since real people aren’t allowed the same tax and legal benefits.
My proposal isn’t to cripple the economy that provides us with our current lifestyle by limiting corporations, but instead just extends the governmental control, tax breaks, legal shelters, and influence that corporations have back to the the common person.
Leave a Reply