Sonja van Baardwijk-Holten <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>Ever tried to sue a large company? They flatten you on the spot. So it
>might be a right, but it hardly ever can be excersised in reality.
Hardly. Large companies sue each other all the time.
An individual vs. a large company legal fight is just the same as an
individual vs. a very rich individual - how much legal council you can
affort. A very well off individual could successfully sue a large company
given sufficient merits.
A company (or corporation) is really just a means of allowing a group of
people of any size to work together as one legal entity. We might have names
like "organization" for things like Greenpeace that want to avoid the stigma
of being money-grubbing capitalist oppressors, but they're the same thing -
just a different agenda.
When discussing a company firing employees, consider the analogy: you
(individually) have a housekeeper as an employee. If you can no longer
afford the service, can you fire him/her? What is the distinction if the
employee is working for a company of persons? I would argue that the
shareholders are usually the only "members" of a large company. They allow
the board of directors to manage it, and allow distributed micromanagement -
that is, employees are usually trusted to make decisions within their areas.
That doesn't make the employees members of the company or immune from the
realities of the company. An employee with stock can certainly have some say
in their fate, but proportional to their investment in the company.
Yes, corporations can be short-sighted. Good corporations are usually fairly
good at long term planning, or they don't last long. As a counter point,
though, how is the general public at long term planning? Take a recent
initiative passed in Washington that slashes the cost of yearly car
registrations from $600 to $30 (or some such) - when the tax money was
paying for infrastructure maintenance.
Unless you plan to appoint a benevolent dictator, the public isn't any
better at making good long term decisions.
Consider this hypothesis:
The human species, based on its basic psychology and physiology, is
incapable of managing the resources of Earth while satisfying the desires of
the majority of its members.
There seems to be a widespread assumption that the above hypothesis is false
- that is, we can all be happy and satisfied and live in peace and harmony
with the planet. But neither case can be proven. What if it is true? That
is, there is no possible means to organize a human society that will be
stable both regarding its structure and environmental impact. Surely, one
has yet to be proposed that stands up to scruitiny or test.
I tentatively assume the hypothesis is true. That is, you can't let people
do their own thing (which makes some class of people happy), give everybody
what they need (another class), give everybody what they want (another
class), and simultaneously have zero net impact on the planet.
(Notwithstanding magic technology like replicators.)
My solution (which I bring up like a broken record) is to let people leave
(the planet). Go off and do whatever the heck you want. Large scale de-facto
anarchy (I can't enforce any rules on you if you're outside my light cone)
with lower scale libertarianism (basic means of commerce) and lower scale
organization into whatever people want to try (so a commune of 100 might be
stable, but there's a democracy of 10 million on the asteroid next door). I
don't envision anything more structured being stable for thousands of years;
conversely, I don't relish the alternative attempts, and I think it's going
to be hellishly painful to get there but there's basically no choice.
Joshua
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