Adventure Capitalist

It seems that pretentious grandstanding against corporations is the “in” thing to do among those who consider themselves progressive “intellectuals” - preferably by vacuous armwaving at constructed strawmen. Corporations are said to be everything that’s bad and evil about the world, they are somehow the magical puppet masters that supposedly control our lives and dupe us to become slaves to our corporate overlords, all at the same time.

Exactly how this is done is often left unexplained, however I can assure you that no officials from General Electric or any other major corporation have yet to knock on my door with guns to force me to do their bidding or submit to their will. Though I hear governments and government officials occasionally do this..

What’s In a Corporation?
Ok, I’ll cut the sarcasm now. Let us examine exactly what a corporation is:
A corporation is effectively an individual or collection of individuals who have received a charter from the government to pursue some business goal. In exchange for acting as tax collectors for the government (income tax, sales tax, payroll tax, corporate tax…), the corporation is endowed with certain government granted privileges, such as preferential tax treatment and limited liability for its owners.

Here in lies the crux of the matter: corporations are not a creation of the free market, they could not possibly be! To achieve limited liability, the limitation has to be enforced by government guarantees of such limitation, ultimately backed by governments monopoly on the use of force and the willingness of government courts to look the other way at times in exchange for outsourcing tax collection.

Furthermore, seeing as a corporation is a collection of individuals striving for a common business goal, the morals of a corporation is simply a reflection of the morals of the individuals that make up the corporation.
Hence, corporations are not any more or less amoral, any more or less unethical than any other group of people collaborating towards some goal. The morals would be the same regardless of whether they are organized as a corporation, government or just loosely joined individuals. Believing that government is good and corporations are bad by default, or the other way around is a very oversimplified and false dichotomy to believe in.

Grandstanding Against People
For all intents and purposes, grandstanding against corporations is grandstanding against people. Assigning corporations magical characteristics or evil is intellectually dishonest and fraudulent at worst, thoughtless at best. It lacks any sort of will to investigate the morals of the individuals that make up the organisation on an individual basis.

Both governments and corporations are fictitious entities, they only exist in so far as they are social constructs that are widely accepted. At the end of the day, they are simply collections of people, assembled in various ways, for various purposes, and hence will reflect the collective morals of the people that they consist of. In this context, it is worth considering that some of the worst acts of genocide in the last 100 years where likely initiated by bureaucrats sitting in cosy offices, “just following orders”..