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Sure, I'm not trying to argue that VOC was the very first company. Companies of various types date back to the silk road. But large-scale corporations were larg

Sure, I'm not trying to argue that VOC was the very first company. Companies of various types date back to the silk road. But large-scale corporations were largely conceptualized during mercantilism and their history is inextricably tied to colonialism, which can't be overlooked when people start saying things like "corporations were created to help society." They helped some people, but they also wiped out entire populations (see the Banda Islands).

LudwigNagasena 5y ago
>can't be overlooked when people start saying things like "corporations were created to help society." Uhm, who says that? Corporations were always created by people who wanted to cooperate to pursue their common interests.
- thr0wawayf00 5y ago
  It is literally a direct quote from the post I originally responded to.
- eropple 5y ago
  That's not correct. Corporations, particularly in the limited-liability sense of the term, are created by society, not people. The laws of a jurisdiction provide a carve-out for a fictional entity that gets special rules to protect the people who act as its brain. But that's different from those people creating it. And to this end, the only reason to create a corporation is to make society better. If they're not, we have the ability to revoke their charters, and we should use that more.
  - thr0wawayf00 5y ago
    > And to this end, the only reason to create a corporation is to make society better I'm sorry but this is patently false, the reason to create a corporation is to capture profit. Want to make society better? There are numerous non-profit and government organizations that broadly aim for this goal which do not turn a profit. The goal of a corporation is to sell goods or services, and hopefully those goods or services do in fact better society. However, this is far too often not the case to make the argument that corporations exist to improve society. Look at how much control corporations have over our society today, they're practically invincible and indemnifiable in our current culture because they're so much more insulated legally than individuals.
    - eropple 5y ago
      Perhaps I was unclear, but you get that you're lecturing me about what I just said, right? What you are describing is the goal for a person to apply to have a corporation created for them to manage. That's not the reason that society allows corporate charters to exist. Society need not allow a corporate charter to be established that does not benefit that society, and can revoke them should they not be achieving the goals of the society that grants them.
  - jazzyjackson 5y ago
    What is the average person’s interest in creating laws aroubd i corporation? Doesn’t it stand to reason that it’s the people creating businesses that would be the ones suggesting the laws that protect themselves from liability? The fact that corporate charters are never revoked points to the laws being in the corporations favor, not the citizens’
    - eropple 5y ago
      You're right. They absolutely are. They don't have to be. From where I stand, corporations should be afraid of the societies that grant them their charters.
    - parineum 5y ago
      We allow those protections to allow people to take business risks without taking significant personal risk. This encourages entrepreneurship. I don't think you'd see as many people trying to build widgets if they had to put their family's home on the line. In exchange for those protections, we get widgets.
      - jazzyjackson 5y ago
        Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that LLC / incorporation has no benefit to society, it plainly does. I was responding to the conjecture that it's society at large that writes the rules. I figure the stakeholders writing the laws are the people who have the most to gain.
mistrial9 5y ago
I read a lengthy account of US Corporate history in graduate school (whose exact title eludes me at the moment). My impression is that in the US, there was a desire to tie transportation to broader physical markets, and include decreasing costs by owning the warehouse and distribution infrastructure. On the marketing end, a common brand name for a family of products was also owned by the corporation. An important early US example is the National Biscuit Company NABISCO. There were no US national food companies, as each market had the combination of brands, storage and distribution for the food product. The corporation held assets large enough to tie market regions together. It was not a small feat and was very much the Big Markets Tech of the time. Sears and Roebuck from Chicago form a different model, with non-perishable goods. For international finance, early 20th century oil played a special role, not adequately described here. As far as the parent comment about corporations "killing people" .. this is true but naive.. since the Romans and before, brutality was the norm, not the exception. Every educated person and most others knew about extreme forms of collective abuse, it had happened again and again. The very formation of civilization, including merchant and trade functions, was generally meant to be an improvement on past forms. Rarely, but with serious circumstance, some merchant company would rape and murder their way to fortune for a while. But karma is a bitch as they say, and those things did change. The tame history I cite above, was specifically aimed at making a better economic engine, for profit by ownership, which upon consideration was the chosen path.
- thr0wawayf00 5y ago
  That's really interesting, I'd read the crap out of that US corporate history book if you ever recall the name.
  - fuzzfactor 5y ago
    All that would not have been possible without the arrival of "modern" stock exchanges. Also, their reorganization after each first generation of underhanded practices became recognized, otherwise attention could not have been as well diverted from the ability to leverage greed even more so than leverage the resources of the smaller investors. Good historical reference sections on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Stock_Exchange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Stock_Exchange >During the 17th century, stockbrokers were not allowed in the Royal Exchange due to their rude manners. They had to operate from other establishments in the vicinity, notably Jonathan's Coffee-House. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia_Stock_Exchange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia_Stock_Exchange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tontine_Coffee_House https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tontine_Coffee_House https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Stock_Exchange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Stock_Exchange NYSE of course is where lots of the money ended up from the international slave trade, and not just from sales in North America. Seems to me that's what allowed NYC to take the place of London as the world's financial center, since the UK frowned on slavery much eartier than the US. Also early 20th century oil might have been the only thing with as good or better return than slavery had generated.

LudwigNagasena 5y ago

>can't be overlooked when people start saying things like "corporations were created to help society." Uhm, who says that? Corporations were always created by people who wanted to cooperate to pursue their common interests.

thr0wawayf00 5y ago
It is literally a direct quote from the post I originally responded to.
eropple 5y ago
That's not correct. Corporations, particularly in the limited-liability sense of the term, are created by society, not people. The laws of a jurisdiction provide a carve-out for a fictional entity that gets special rules to protect the people who act as its brain. But that's different from those people creating it. And to this end, the only reason to create a corporation is to make society better. If they're not, we have the ability to revoke their charters, and we should use that more.
- thr0wawayf00 5y ago
  > And to this end, the only reason to create a corporation is to make society better I'm sorry but this is patently false, the reason to create a corporation is to capture profit. Want to make society better? There are numerous non-profit and government organizations that broadly aim for this goal which do not turn a profit. The goal of a corporation is to sell goods or services, and hopefully those goods or services do in fact better society. However, this is far too often not the case to make the argument that corporations exist to improve society. Look at how much control corporations have over our society today, they're practically invincible and indemnifiable in our current culture because they're so much more insulated legally than individuals.
  - eropple 5y ago
    Perhaps I was unclear, but you get that you're lecturing me about what I just said, right? What you are describing is the goal for a person to apply to have a corporation created for them to manage. That's not the reason that society allows corporate charters to exist. Society need not allow a corporate charter to be established that does not benefit that society, and can revoke them should they not be achieving the goals of the society that grants them.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  What is the average person’s interest in creating laws aroubd i corporation? Doesn’t it stand to reason that it’s the people creating businesses that would be the ones suggesting the laws that protect themselves from liability? The fact that corporate charters are never revoked points to the laws being in the corporations favor, not the citizens’
  - eropple 5y ago
    You're right. They absolutely are. They don't have to be. From where I stand, corporations should be afraid of the societies that grant them their charters.
  - parineum 5y ago
    We allow those protections to allow people to take business risks without taking significant personal risk. This encourages entrepreneurship. I don't think you'd see as many people trying to build widgets if they had to put their family's home on the line. In exchange for those protections, we get widgets.
    - jazzyjackson 5y ago
      Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that LLC / incorporation has no benefit to society, it plainly does. I was responding to the conjecture that it's society at large that writes the rules. I figure the stakeholders writing the laws are the people who have the most to gain.

mistrial9 5y ago

I read a lengthy account of US Corporate history in graduate school (whose exact title eludes me at the moment). My impression is that in the US, there was a desire to tie transportation to broader physical markets, and include decreasing costs by owning the warehouse and distribution infrastructure. On the marketing end, a common brand name for a family of products was also owned by the corporation. An important early US example is the National Biscuit Company NABISCO. There were no US national food companies, as each market had the combination of brands, storage and distribution for the food product. The corporation held assets large enough to tie market regions together. It was not a small feat and was very much the Big Markets Tech of the time. Sears and Roebuck from Chicago form a different model, with non-perishable goods. For international finance, early 20th century oil played a special role, not adequately described here. As far as the parent comment about corporations "killing people" .. this is true but naive.. since the Romans and before, brutality was the norm, not the exception. Every educated person and most others knew about extreme forms of collective abuse, it had happened again and again. The very formation of civilization, including merchant and trade functions, was generally meant to be an improvement on past forms. Rarely, but with serious circumstance, some merchant company would rape and murder their way to fortune for a while. But karma is a bitch as they say, and those things did change. The tame history I cite above, was specifically aimed at making a better economic engine, for profit by ownership, which upon consideration was the chosen path.

thr0wawayf00 5y ago
That's really interesting, I'd read the crap out of that US corporate history book if you ever recall the name.
- fuzzfactor 5y ago
  All that would not have been possible without the arrival of "modern" stock exchanges. Also, their reorganization after each first generation of underhanded practices became recognized, otherwise attention could not have been as well diverted from the ability to leverage greed even more so than leverage the resources of the smaller investors. Good historical reference sections on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Stock_Exchange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Stock_Exchange >During the 17th century, stockbrokers were not allowed in the Royal Exchange due to their rude manners. They had to operate from other establishments in the vicinity, notably Jonathan's Coffee-House. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia_Stock_Exchange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia_Stock_Exchange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tontine_Coffee_House https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tontine_Coffee_House https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Stock_Exchange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Stock_Exchange NYSE of course is where lots of the money ended up from the international slave trade, and not just from sales in North America. Seems to me that's what allowed NYC to take the place of London as the world's financial center, since the UK frowned on slavery much eartier than the US. Also early 20th century oil might have been the only thing with as good or better return than slavery had generated.