Tom Toles for March 27, 2014

Big 10-4 to Tom.

Probably closer to the truth than we all like to admit.

Corporations have become a monster never intended by the early leaders of the country. They were weaker and could be dissolved by the state on short notice. Now they run the government.

Legislation aimed at protecting the interests of the East India Company, one of the earliest mega-corporations (too big to be allowed to fail), brought on the American Revolution. Efforts made to eliminate or curtail the slave trade were thwarted in Parliament by the Royal African Company. In the 19th century the raiilroads and mining companies bought and sold congressmen. Ambrose Bierce, a hundred years ago, defined a corporation as “An ingenious device for obtaining profit without individual responsibility.” The real problems of capitalism rarely seem to arise because someone acts irresponsibly or immorally in regard to a business he owns. Perhaps this is because large enterprises are rarely owned outright by individuals, or small groups of partners. Usually they are owned by innumerable and anonymous stockholders, while control is vested in persons who are thus enabled to wield the combined vast resources while shield themselves from actual responsibility or liability. All this is made possible by laws (laws that are in no way new) which recognize these “ingenious devices” as persons with standing in the law, persons that may avail themselves of laws necessary for the protection of real persons, while immune from other laws that serve to control the reckless behavior of real persons. Perhaps there is more truth than jest in the old one “I will believe that a corporation is a person when Texas executes one.”

The cartoon is wrong. It’s the result of giving government lots of power.

If the Supreme Court decides companies can refuse to cover birth control for their employees because of management’s religious beliefs, I wonder how many CEOs will suddenly convert to Christian Science and declare that providing workers with any form of health coverage is against their religion…?

Leave it to Tom to tell me what I was thinking but couldn’t find it in the mess. Each time, every time.

Christopher, what a company provides for its employees is a contract between employee and company. If they don’t agree on the contract terms, they can work elsewhere. The government has no right to impose their will in the contract, except to assure it is not fraudulent.

Vile distortion of the truth.

Sure TTM. The government is no better and usually worse than corporations at what they do. When it comes to things like environment, consumer protection, etc., the government will take one of two tracks:.They either ignore problems until they become massive ones then blame corporations for the problem and react in a knee jerk fashion with over-reaching regulation and massive legal action, warranted or not..or.The produce more and more regulation until they strangle an industry virtually out of existance..Two excellent examples are OSHA and the EPA. Both have a useful purpose and were really necessary.Let’s take OSHA. Before it tens of thousands of people in the US were killed a year in industrial accidents. For example more Americans died during WW 2 from industrial accidents than on battlefields. Injuries were commonplace.That needed fixing. And OSHA did do that.Today however OSHA has taken a “zero tolerance” approach to safety. ANY accident or potential safety problem, real or imagined, is gone after.As with any large bureaucracy within Big Government, they are largely a law unto themselves. They produce new regulations and rules continiously. These have the effect of law but are not voted on by Congress or signed into law by the President.Look at the EPA. They unilaterally declared CO2 a “pollutant” and started to move to regulate it. In essence, without any statutory authority the EPA enacted the Kyoto Treaty through bureaucratic proceedure.This is true for the whole alphabet soup of agencies.Big Government is unaccountable because no one can track what it does. That is an immense amount of power. Worse, it is also not held libel for its actions. At most some regulation or rule is declared by the courts to be illegal or invalid. The damage it did while in place to individuals or businesses is not made whole. That is, the government doesn’t have to pay for their mistake. Bureaucrats are not fired. Managers are not held accountable. Even if fines are levied they come out of tax money so the business or individual pays their own reward..Government also is the largest “corporation” in existance. Look at how much money they collect and spend. Government will gladly sacrifice “the little people” to further their political and economic expansion as willingly as any “evil” corporation will..Government is neither benevolent or altruistic. It is just as greedy, manipulative, and rotten as any corporation is.When it gets BIG it also becomes unaccountable for its actions.

Oh TTM, on your lenghty … discussion… on Toyota….How much of any car manufacturer’s design today is FORCED on them by government mandates?I know that the cost of those mandates is somewhere between $4000 and $12,000 per vehicle (this varies depending on how you cost it out and what you include). Much of it does not improve vehicle safety or is of very marginal value.Electronic ignition and control of the engine and transmission is largely a result of emmissions control requirements.Who demanded anti-lock brakes? Hybred vehicles were brought on by government regulation too..So, when it comes down to it, Statist Capitalism with the government forcing their requirements on manufacturers are really the underlying cause and the government should be held ultimately responsible for their failure.

“the ‘cartoonist’, if you care to call him that…”

If only you had an inkling how ludicrous that sounds. Of course he’s a cartoonist. Of course, the rest of your comment indicates that you’ll never figure it out anyway.

Get real. As an anti-socialist, the individual should come first for you. Obviously you believe corporate “religious beliefs” should trump personal ones. I’m not converting to your sect of corporate worship.

Could, in theory, happen if its a corporate religious belief. But if we continue to extend human rights to corporations, real people need to go to jail. Still waiting on Wall Street to serve their time.

A corporation can be defined as a group of people who, because they believe it benefits their group, do things that are beneath the moral code of every individual member of the group. That’s also the definition of a lynch mob.

Too bad Toles didn’t include the 56 1/2 million babies murdered on the altar of inconvenience.

Emergency responders may risk fire and explosions in internal combustion car crashes.

“I Built It, Myself !!!”

The funny thing is, a corporation is everything conservatives are supposed to dislike. A collective enterprise in which a small elite is in control, and employees and stockholders dare not interfere for fear of losing their jobs/savings. It is usually organized hierarchically, with very little freedom allowed to the members of the corporate “team.” As an institution, the corporation is diametrically opposed to “rugged individualism” and “personal responsibility.” I am not one of those who think that corporations are evil, per se, or that limited liability and corporate “personhood” are bad ideas. But I do hold that all corporate entities exist because the public have made laws that allow them to exist, when they are in no way part of the “natural order of things.” The public have every right to regulate such institutions in such a manner as to ensure that the benefit the public good, and not merely the private interests of a few.

Why should anyone have to pay for some other person’s irresponsible behavior. If you don’t want to have children then be abstinent. It works every time it’s tried. Why should others have to pay for your poor choices.-…and with abortion it is not only the taxpayer, corporations, and insurance companies paying either, it is the 56 1/2 million babies butchered at the altar of someone elses personal inconvenience due to their own poor choices.-Where is your outrage over the “human sacrifice” of 56 1/2 million babies?-What ever happened to personal responsibility?

“is about than what certain obnoxious corporate types think it’s about, and their desire to inflict their version on their employees.”-But it’s okay for irresponsible people to inflict the cost of their baby’s murder onto their employer?-Again I ask, what about personal responsibility?

Last year Planned Parenthood (received $540.6 million government dollars. This year alone they performed over 81,000 abortions. Oh, but that’s right…none of that money helps support abortions (nod, nod wink, wink).-Abortion pills cause the death of a conceived life…hence the name “abortion” pill.-What is irresponsible is the death of 56 1/2 million babies. You are for that kind of killing which makes you the fanatic in my book.-Don’t you wish your mom took advantage of the abortion services freely offered in this country when you were conceived?