Executing Corporations

[drplokta]

Theres a meme going round "I'll believe that corporations are people when Texas executes one". But Texas "executes" hundreds or thousands of corporations per year, most famously Enron. Bankruptcy is the exact equivalent of execution for corporations -- it's the state exerting its power and causing the corporation to cease to exist. So I guess that corporations are people.

Comments

[del-c.livejournal.com]

Trying and executing corporations is the answer to a different problem than "is this sector of the economy a toxic mess?", and the answer to that problem is something other than trying and executing corporations. If a bank is a bad bank, it can be a good bank, and rehabilitation can set it on the road to being one. If an entity just shouldn't exist at all, but does thanks to the incentives in the environment, then you've changed the subject to one different from the one under discussion.

To stretch the people analogy again, you're looking at incarceration and lethal injection as if it were a good way of cleaning up a bad neighbourhood, when maybe employment and infrastructure investment would be more to the purpose.