* * * * *
Rise of the Corporate State
One of my readers, Marcus Livius Drusus, sent in his comments on the START
OF CORPORATISM: [1]
> The British East India Company (charted on Dec. 31, 1600, you hit that part
> exactly right) was the first of the proto-corporations that were organized
> to expedite the great trading and exploration voyages.
>
> (Parenthetical note, this was only made possible, or it might be better to
> say useful or desirable, by the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588—prior
> to that the Spanish and the Portugese had a deathgrip on the spice trade.)
>
> Prior to this new type of organization, with the creation of a fictitious
> persona, the corporation, any investor would have been personally liable
> for any losses of the venture, to the entire extent of his personal assets.
>
>
> The release from personal liability afforded made it much more easy to
> organize and finance these extremely risky operations.
>
> Now, with that out of the way, I will take a bit of an issue with your
> placement of the date of transition from nationalism to corporatism, for
> the following reasons:
>
> First, if one would like to argue this date marked the first appearance of
> limited liability fictive entities, that would be incorrect. The early
> Middle Ages saw the first of these, in the form of towns, universities and
> religious orders. Later, the principle included guilds. This was
> established in English common law by the 14th century.
>
> The other way to argue this would be to mention that this saw the first
> application of the concept to private enterprise and for profit entities,
> that is technically correct. However, charters for these enterprises were
> for purposes only seen by the granting government as in it's
> national(istic) interests. They were private tools of public policy.
>
> It was not until after the onery American colonists revolted after 1776 was
> there support for enterprises unrelated to the direct public interest.
> (Alexander Hamilton was an early champion of the idea) Still by 1800, well
> over 95% of all the corporations chartered in the States were for purposes
> of thngs like building and operating bridges, roads, canals, and other
> public service tasks.
>
> Finally, in 1811, New York enacted legislation that enabled corporations to
> be charted with nothing much more than a statement of the intended purposes
> of the business. Many of the other states took until the 1850's to do so.
> England did in 1825, and the other European countries followed soon after.
>
> So, based on this, I would argue that the first part of the 19^th century
> is the earliest time that can be considered the birth of an independent
> corporation. If I were forced to pick the point at which the transition to
> a corporate state began, I would argue that it happened immediately after
> the Civil War. The urgencies of the war required consolidation of the
> railroads, setting the stage for the first real national super-corporations
> with the wealth and power to influence politicians, and therefore public
> policy, an exact reversal of the status of the British East India Company.
>
If we go along those thoughts then, perhaps the start of the corporate state
can be traced back to May 10^th, 1886 with Santa Clara County v. Southern
Pacific Railroad Company [2] where corporations could be considered a
“fictional person” under the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution:
> **Section 1.** All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and
> subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and
> of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law
> which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United
> States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or
> property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its
> jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
>
[1]
gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2002/03/22.1
[2]
http://www.ratical.org/corporations/SCvSPR1886.html
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