3 ms·

I have to admit I don’t follow the full extent of your argument, not necessarily through your fault. > You can't alienate your right to life and health, so you

I have to admit I don’t follow the full extent of your argument, not necessarily through your fault. > You can't alienate your right to life and health, so you can't possibly make a contractual agreement to limit such liability. Do you mean that those rights would be protected by law even in a libertarian society, so they couldn’t be defined by contracts? I don’t think many libertarians believe liability should be truly unlimited, at least not to the extent where it would be infringing on certain individual rights. Even so, in the scenario where no one wants to enter into a contract with a company because it doesn’t provide certain protections, the company would have no choice but to either change the clause, or lose the employee to a competitor. Replace employee with a group of employees organized into a union and you could have a similar outcome, all without a significant legal framework in place. But again, I might be misunderstanding your line of reasoning.

sudosysgen 4y ago
Well, libertarians believe in natural law doctrine as a core belief, right? So you must have rights which can never ever be given up, not even by contract. In the scenario it wouldn't be that no one would want to enter contract with the company because it couldn't provide those protections. Many protections are a result of inalienable rights, so you can't have a contract which removes those protections. Since the organization wouldn't have legal personhood, it would mean that the owners and/or employees would be personally liable if the company were to violate one of those inalienable protections. That makes investment or membership in those organizations extremely unattractive. For many types of organizations this isn't necessarily a problem, but for organizations in many sectors such as healthcare, anything that requires hazardous labour, the automotive industry, private security, etc..., it means that investment is really not a good idea because your personal liability might put you in jail. This is of course because the organization couldn't negotiate a contract with it's clients where the clients would give up these protections, because these kinds of protections which derive from natural rights can't be given up. So in the end you need legal personhood to protect the investor class, otherwise capitalism doesn't really work anymore when investors are too afraid by personal liability. And that's why legal personhood for the purpose of general enterprise started 300 years ago and is now a thing everywhere save for North Korea (even Cuba and the USSR had to allow citizens to form limited liability entities with legal personhood for economic activity, because even when you don't allow investors, limited liability turns out to be very practical when you have partnerships with very large numbers of partners)

sudosysgen 4y ago

Well, libertarians believe in natural law doctrine as a core belief, right? So you must have rights which can never ever be given up, not even by contract. In the scenario it wouldn't be that no one would want to enter contract with the company because it couldn't provide those protections. Many protections are a result of inalienable rights, so you can't have a contract which removes those protections. Since the organization wouldn't have legal personhood, it would mean that the owners and/or employees would be personally liable if the company were to violate one of those inalienable protections. That makes investment or membership in those organizations extremely unattractive. For many types of organizations this isn't necessarily a problem, but for organizations in many sectors such as healthcare, anything that requires hazardous labour, the automotive industry, private security, etc..., it means that investment is really not a good idea because your personal liability might put you in jail. This is of course because the organization couldn't negotiate a contract with it's clients where the clients would give up these protections, because these kinds of protections which derive from natural rights can't be given up. So in the end you need legal personhood to protect the investor class, otherwise capitalism doesn't really work anymore when investors are too afraid by personal liability. And that's why legal personhood for the purpose of general enterprise started 300 years ago and is now a thing everywhere save for North Korea (even Cuba and the USSR had to allow citizens to form limited liability entities with legal personhood for economic activity, because even when you don't allow investors, limited liability turns out to be very practical when you have partnerships with very large numbers of partners)