quote:Not in the same way. If I dump a barrel of poison into a river, I can claim I didn't know it was poison, but there's going to be an issue of negligence that simply won't exist in a corporate setting, where oversight responsibility for my actions is held to belong to others.
That's just not true, Lisa. The claim one didn't know what was in a barrel will almost certainly not provide a defense against negligence on the part of the employee pouring the stuff into the river even if true. It's likely the employee won't actually be sued, because the guy doing the dumping usually has no money. But that's a choice made by the plaintiff, not the law.
Moreover, the corporation as a whole will also be liable - the key word being "also."
Lack of knowledge will provide a defense against some (but not all) environmental crimes, because it is a fundamental principle of our criminal justice system that some mental element is required for most crimes.
But corporations are by definition "limited liability" so the people who reap the profits (i.e. the stockholders) can never be held liable for more than the value of their stock. As long as that is the case, their will be pressure for corporations to place safety concerns over profit.
What's more, in practice actually employees of the company enjoy an apparent limited liability in practice as well. When was the last time a CEO, board member or even middle manager of the company went to jail for poisoning a stream for blowing up a small town.
Posts: 12591 | Registered: Jan 2000
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quote:When was the last time a CEO, board member or even middle manager of the company went to jail for poisoning a stream for blowing up a small town.
I think that has more to do with the difficulty in pinning the blame on a specific individual in a large organization, as well as the resources available to the organization for defending itself and it's employees. The fact that the corporation is a separate legal entity from its employees and owners is not the cause of this.
Posts: 3275 | Registered: May 2007
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If I think X is bad, then this reads as a condemnation of capitalism.
If I think X is good, then this reads as an endorsement of capitalism.
It's a very contrived example, but I think you can see where advocacy for a position could be seen as criticism of that position if the reader doesn't come from the same philosophical starting point as the author.
It's contrived, all right. I didn't say there was no other explanation. Just no rational one, given the actual context. Which includes an enormous volume of writings by the same author, btw.
What you're saying could fly if there were no context at all.
Posts: 12266 | Registered: Jul 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Tammy: Did this book make anyone else cry? Seriously, I cried. I know...I'm strange.
Why is that strange? I'm curious, though. What part made you cry? There were places that had me on the verge of tears.
Posts: 12266 | Registered: Jul 2005
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quote:It's contrived, all right. I didn't say there was no other explanation. Just no rational one, given the actual context. Which includes an enormous volume of writings by the same author, btw.
*shrug* If you say so.
Posts: 3275 | Registered: May 2007
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quote:But corporations are by definition "limited liability" so the people who reap the profits (i.e. the stockholders) can never be held liable for more than the value of their stock. As long as that is the case, their will be pressure for corporations to place safety concerns over profit.
Which is a VERY different thing than what Lisa said.
Moreover, there are a couple thousand ways to create that limited liability that I doubt most people would favor getting rid of. For example, people who lend money are generally not held liable for what the borrower does with it. It's trivial (but time-consuming) to create a deal structured as a loan that still gives the profits to the lender. Even without doing that, the pressure to make loan payments creates the exact same pressure. The phenomenon you describe is not unique to corporations or to limited liability entities, nor does it arise from their limited liability nature.
quote:What's more, in practice actually employees of the company enjoy an apparent limited liability in practice as well. When was the last time a CEO, board member or even middle manager of the company went to jail for poisoning a stream for blowing up a small town.
I linked two in this thread. And those are only the ones that created appellate rulings on employee liability. It was a 30-second search on Westlaw. Were I to dig more deeply, I'd find more.
Moreover, outside the environmental area, there have been dozens of high-profile prosecutions for actions taken on behalf of corporations.
quote:I think that has more to do with the difficulty in pinning the blame on a specific individual in a large organization, as well as the resources available to the organization for defending itself and it's employees. The fact that the corporation is a separate legal entity from its employees and owners is not the cause of this.
Exactly. It's very difficult to prove these crimes whether the entity is a corporation or a mob family.
As long as we as a society want to carry out endeavors that require more than one person, this problem will exist.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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quote:the only rational conclusion is that you and the author are using the word differently.
I can think of a few other rational conclusions.
Would you care to name just one?
Sure. A rational conclusion is that my arguments aren't actually correct. This is something that could potentially be determined if you actually addressed them as opposed to making ideological (and sometimes demonstrably false) statements unconnected to either the book or what I've said.
What I actually think happened is something that I think we've actually sort of covered. As I said, I don't think that this criticism was intended. Rather, it just grows naturally out of the reality of the situations she was trying to portray. As you said, the focus inThe Fountainhead was not on capitalism and how there aren't any problems with it at all, but rather on individualism. In order to make the points on individualism that she did, Ayn Rand pulled in situations from a capitalistic society that showed a bad aspect to it.
In capitalism, people who control the capital control the resources and can determine what is done with those resources. As such, people who want to create things using those resources (or just exchange their labor for the means with which to support themselves) are beholden to the people who have capital. Taking it simplistically, there are two traditional sources of this, individuals or small groups that have accumulated disproportionately large amounts of capital or a mass of people, each with some small amount of capital.
In pushing her individualism message, Ayn Rand makes the point that these sources of capital tend to use it in ways that oppose quality and creativity. She demonstrates a world where there are obvious problems in that these people can do what they do with their capital.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
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quote:Originally posted by Tammy: Did this book make anyone else cry? Seriously, I cried. I know...I'm strange.
Why is that strange? I'm curious, though. What part made you cry? There were places that had me on the verge of tears.
You know, it was so long ago, I can't say. I had mixed emotions through out the entire book. I remember that I was definitely into the relationship tug of war between Roark & Dominique. They broke my heart so many times.
I think Rand did an extremely good job in writing the controversial rape episode. It left me a little stirred and shaken and then some.
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