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Humanity's Worst Idea Ever
robert — (archived)

To me it's a tie for first place: monotheism, and the limited liability corporation.

The idea of the LLC has been around for 3-400 years, but it was in the 19th century that it was transformed from an exceptional organizational tool, requiring a charter from a state legislature or Congress in America, into the routine standard business form. It never ceases to amaze me how it was less than a century after we fought a revolution to to free ourselves from one sort of feudal tyranny, that we set up a new form of feudal tyranny right in our midst. Anyone who's worked in a corporation knows that feudalism is alive and well in America.

We envisioned the American form of government as an egalitarian association to resist those who would try to exert power over us. Why do we allow corporations to grow so large that their power rivals that of governments, while being exercised in an unaccountable way more reminiscent of kings?

Conservatives, to me, are exhibiting extreme tunnel vision to focus only on the overt power of government, exemplified by the recurring use of the phrase "...at gunpoint" to describe any action at all by government. In the modern world, the power of overt force is trumped by the power to shape the economy. We're all part of the system of the world now, and the only free agents are living in rude huts in the Rockies. The rest of us have to live in somewhere in the mesh formed by competing powerful economic players.

The conservative majority on the Suprement Court recently referred to the free speech "rights" of corporations.

We're doomed.

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