TokyoTom: We Build Our Society
type: channel
description: Just another Weblog at Harvard Law School
date: 2016-08-08T09:09:08Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: How we fuel crony capitalism; Dialogue with Kevin Gutzman on the Constitutional “speech” rights of state-created corporations and Incorporation Doctrine
items: Note to Larry Lessig: Shall we amend the Constitution, but ignore possible reforms to limited liability corporation laws in the fifty states?
items: Yes, there’s a problem with “Libertarian Wishful Thinking.” But there’s hope, despite Bob Higgs’ clear-sighted glumness.
items: As Bob Monks says, “corporate governance has failed and it’s time to move on.” So what’s next? Unleash the Hounds!
items: BLOWBACK in Benghazi and Cairo – it’s not a BUG, it’s a FEATURE
items: Note to Larry Lessig on his “Anti-Corruption Pledge”: Limited liability corporations are the taproot of both growing government and anonymous rent-seeking.
items: Hello world! What does wbos mean on Twitter or Google+?

How we fuel crony capitalism; Dialogue with Kevin Gutzman on the Constitutional “speech” rights of state-created corporations and Incorporation Doctrine
type: item
creator: TokyoTom
date: 2014-11-06T10:41:59Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: Historian and conservative Constitutional scholar Kevin Gutzman posted a comment on his Facebook wall on the Citizens United decision that I took a disliking to. Here is his September 6, 2014 post: There’s a popular meme that “Corporations aren’t people.” The aim is to repeal the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United that Congress cannot under the Speech and […]
encoded: Historian and conservative Constitutional scholar Kevin Gutzman posted a comment on his Facebook wall on the Citizens United decision that I took a disliking to. Here is his September 6, 2014 post: There’s a popular meme that “Corporations aren’t people.” The aim is to repeal the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United that Congress cannot under the Speech and Press Clauses of the First Amendment limit political advertising so stringently as it had been under the McCain-Feingold Act. The point of the meme is that only people are entitled to constitutional protections, and so Congress can do whatever it wants to corporations. Let’s follow the implications of the claim that “Corporations aren’t people.” So you’re going to deny corporations constitutional rights. Does that mean the government will be able to search corporations’ property without warrants? Take their property without trial? Try them without counsel? Censor their publications? Punish them under ex post facto laws? House soldiers in their property during peacetime? Force them to pay to support churches? At least as early as Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819), the Supreme Court recognized that corporations do indeed have rights of individuals. To say that they didn’t would mean empowering government in new and dangerous ways. Besides, we all know that shareholders–corporations–are people. They’re not hamsters. They’re not sandwiches. They’re not automobiles. They’re people. After a bit of dodging, Kevin finally conceded that: “I agree that states have a right to regulate corporate behavior. I oppose the Incorporation Doctrine.” I consider this an important point: here we have a conservative legal historian/legal scholar essentially saying that he OPPOSES the Supreme Court’s SUMMARY extension of its new First Amendment doctrine in Citizens United to the STATES via the 14th Amendment “Incorporation” doctrine, in the 2012 Montana case, American Tradition Partnership v. Bullock. Below are relevant excerp…

Note to Larry Lessig: Shall we amend the Constitution, but ignore possible reforms to limited liability corporation laws in the fifty states?
type: item
creator: TokyoTom
date: 2013-04-22T09:14:40Z
subject: Corporations
subject: Corporatism
description: When Larry Lessig launched his “Anti-Corruption Pledge” last year, I commented on the Wiki page he set up for it, and left a copy in an earlier blog post. Larry responded the next day. I copy here both his reply and my counter-comment: But even if Limited Liability is a more fundamental problem, which I’m not […]
encoded: When Larry Lessig launched his “Anti-Corruption Pledge” last year, I commented on the Wiki page he set up for it, and left a copy in an earlier blog post. Larry responded the next day. I copy here both his reply and my counter-comment: But even if Limited Liability is a more fundamental problem, which I’m not convinced it is, but if: You still need the means to address it, which you don’t have till you address the money problem first. Lessig 10:44, 5 March 2012 (EST) Larry, thanks for your comment, but I’m not sure I follow you. I think it is a fundamental mistake to ignore that corporations are created in states, despite their tendency to accept if not push for the federalization of corporate law. Sure, we can try to address money in campaigns at a federal level, but that’s no reason to turn our back on the leverage that we have in fighting for more responsible corporations – and corporate owners. It’s alot easier to win at least one small victory when you’re also fighting in 50 smaller fora rather than just one big one. TokyoTom 14:44, 17 March 2012 (EDT)

Yes, there’s a problem with “Libertarian Wishful Thinking.” But there’s hope, despite Bob Higgs’ clear-sighted glumness.
type: item
creator: TokyoTom
date: 2013-04-18T12:54:48Z
subject: Corporatism
description: [cross-posted from my Ludwig von Mises Institute-hosted blog.] Robert Higgs, Senior Fellow in Political Economy and Editor at Large, The Independent Review, has a piece up at The Independent Institute (last Tuesday, April 9), “Libertarian Wishful Thinking,” that is worth a “gander”. I’d like to focus on the paragraphs excerpted below, and then give Bob […]
encoded: [cross-posted from my Ludwig von Mises Institute-hosted blog.] Robert Higgs, Senior Fellow in Political Economy and Editor at Large, The Independent Review, has a piece up at The Independent Institute (last Tuesday, April 9), “Libertarian Wishful Thinking,” that is worth a “gander”. I’d like to focus on the paragraphs excerpted below, and then give Bob and other lovers of freedom a little “goose”. Says Mr. Higgs: As a rule, libertarians incline toward wishful thinking. They constantly pluck little events, statements, and movies from the flow of life and cry out, “Eureka! Libertarianism is on the march!” With some of my friends, this tendency is so marked that I have become amused by its recurrent expression—well, there he goes again! Some of this tendency springs, I believe, from their immersion in abstract thought and writing. … One who maintains, as I do, that the existing system may crumble little by little, having heedlessly sowed thousands of poisonous seeds of its own destruction, but almost certainly will never just roll over and admit defeat, may seem to be a defeatist. But nothing is gained by entertaining an unrealistic view of what liberty lovers are up against. Even if one believes, as I do, that the existing system is not viable in the very long run, it may last in episodically patched-up forms for a long, long time. There are no magic bullets, such as abolishing the Fed. The state can use other means in the highly unlikely event that it should no longer have the Fed in its arsenal. The same can be said about most of the system’s other key elements. … In truth, the time for liberty lovers to make a stand that had a fighting chance of success was a century ago. But that chance was squandered, if indeed it ever packed much punch. … Wishful thinking about the impending triumph of liberty may be uplifting for libertarians, but it avails neither them nor the world anything of real importance. But it seems to me that while there is a great deal of truth here,…

As Bob Monks says, “corporate governance has failed and it’s time to move on.” So what’s next? Unleash the Hounds!
type: item
creator: TokyoTom
date: 2013-03-22T11:13:01Z
subject: Corporations
subject: Corporatism
subject: Social Capital
description: [Cross-posted from my main blog, this is a precis of an earlier post, in which I had cross-posted a blog post by Bob Monks. Minor edits.] As I noted, veteran shareholder activist Robert A.G. Monks has concluded that – in brief (emphasis added): the people who exercise power for the corporations need to be accountable […]
encoded: [Cross-posted from my main blog, this is a precis of an earlier post, in which I had cross-posted a blog post by Bob Monks. Minor edits.] As I noted, veteran shareholder activist Robert A.G. Monks has concluded that – in brief (emphasis added): the people who exercise power for the corporations need to be accountable to somebody. Over the years, it has become clear that they really are not accountable to anybody, and our experiment in self-regulation and minimal oversight has failed. In practice, this has meant that a small group of individual CEOs exercise power over financing elections and lobbying the passage and enforcement of laws. … Society is a give-and-take proposition but for now, the powerful take much more than they contribute and that is not sustainable. For me, corporate governance has failed and it’s time to move on. So what do we do? I’ve already discussed this in a number of posts relating to how the state grant of limited liability to corporate shareholders has released moral hazard on a massive scale, leading to pollution and labor problems, a cycle of pressure for government ‘protection’ and government capture. These problems have been compounded by the “Principal – Agent problem” on which Bob Monks is throwing in the towel, which problem has its roots in limited liability of shareholders and has been exacerbated by the very securities laws that purport to protect shareholders of listed companies. I left the following response at Bob’s blog (emphasis added): Posted by TokyoTom on Nov 3, 2011 at 12:32 PM Bob, the answer is simple: — Let shareholders of publicly-listed firms alone to figure out how to protect their own interests [sink or swim], and — Let better managed firms that don’t tap public markets (and thus who have smaller numbers of more sophisticated investors who don’t need the dubious ‘protections’ of Government) eat the lunches of the bigger, more bureaucratic and less profitable public firms. In other words, the existing system can’t b…

BLOWBACK in Benghazi and Cairo – it’s not a BUG, it’s a FEATURE
type: item
creator: TokyoTom
date: 2012-09-13T02:30:05Z
subject: Corporations
subject: Corporatism
description: For those befuddled about the “Global War on Terror” and the attacks on US embassies/consulates in Libya and Egypt, perhaps this bit of fun from The Onion in 1998 might help: State Department To Hold Enemy Tryouts Next Week (excerpts below; go to link for full piece)(emphasis added) Taking steps to fill the void that […]
encoded: For those befuddled about the “Global War on Terror” and the attacks on US embassies/consulates in Libya and Egypt, perhaps this bit of fun from The Onion in 1998 might help: State Department To Hold Enemy Tryouts Next Week (excerpts below; go to link for full piece)(emphasis added) Taking steps to fill the void that has plagued the American military-industrial complex since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright announced Tuesday that the U.S. will hold enemy tryouts next week. … The decision to hold enemy auditions was made during an Oct. 16 meeting at the Pentagon attended by a number of top military-industrial-complex officials, including Albright, Defense Secretary William Cohen, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Strom Thurmond (R-SC) and Lockheed Martin CEO Thomas Reuthven. “Everyone was of the opinion that an enemy was needed–and fast,” said Reuthven, whose company has laid off 14,000 employees since the end of the Cold War. “Nobody wins when there’s peace.” General Electric CEO Jack Welch, who was also at the meeting, agreed. “Our profits are down 43 percent from 10 years ago. We sold more tritium hydrogen-bomb ICBM/MIRV triggers in 1988 than in the last six years combined,” he said. “Something had to be done.” … Speaking to reporters, McDonnell Douglas CEO Richard Klingbell said the State Department should have foreseen the possibility of peace and taken steps to avoid it years ago. “For decades, we took Soviet aggression and the arms race for granted,” Klingbell said. “We failed to realize that one day it might all come to an end. We failed to sow the seeds of future foreign discord, for our children’s sake. Thankfully, though, we’re finally setting things straight. We’re finally remembering that to make it in this world, you’ve got to have enemies.”

Note to Larry Lessig on his “Anti-Corruption Pledge”: Limited liability corporations are the taproot of both growing government and anonymous rent-seeking.
type: item
creator: TokyoTom
date: 2012-05-07T14:54:19Z
subject: Corporations
subject: Corporatism
description: [Note: This is cross-posted from my blog (originally hosted at The Ludwig von Mises Institute)] I refer to the very recently-launched “Anti-Corruption Pledge” here, which is the latest project by prolific Larry Lessig, now a Harvard Law prof and head of a corporate reform center there (and whom I have introduced and discussed in a […]
encoded: [Note: This is cross-posted from my blog (originally hosted at The Ludwig von Mises Institute)] I refer to the very recently-launched “Anti-Corruption Pledge” here, which is the latest project by prolific Larry Lessig, now a Harvard Law prof and head of a corporate reform center there (and whom I have introduced and discussed in a number of preceding posts). Larry further describes the purpose and motivation of the Pledge at his blog. (I note that I’m strongly in favor of pledges, as I noted in this blog post discussing the Kochs.) I left the following comment on the discussion page of the wiki that Lessig created for The Anti-Corruption Pledge: “Larry, you aren’t really attacking the chief problem, which the role that STATE-Created limited liability corporations play in centralization and aggrandizement of power in Washington, which then further attracts rent-seeking by increasingly anonymous (who owns and runs these corporations, anyway?) organizations that wish to use a bloated government to receive favorable inside deals and to raise barriers to entry in their respective markets. “Corporations drive the growth of government because their LIMITED LIABILITY aspect means government protects shareholders from liability in the event of tort damage to workers/others/society. Citizens tired of holding the bag then must continually push legislatures and courts for “reform” that perversely helps to entrench the largest firms against newcomers. “Corporations are not simply the “Health of the State”, but they’re created in STATES, which accordingly MUST be a main venue to seek to rein them in. States can stop creating limited liability companies, can deregulate for non-limited liability firms (where owners retain a large tail of risk), etc. http://tokyotom.freecapitalists.org/?s=limited+liability “Anonymity is not per se bad – the Federalist Papers and Anti-Federalist Papers were written anonymously – it’s the anonymity afford to those whom have already received important …

Hello world! What does wbos mean on Twitter or Google+?
type: item
creator: TokyoTom
date: 2012-05-07T14:36:32Z
subject: Social Capital
description: I quote: “Short for #WeBuildOurSociety, it’s a tag deliberately created to remind us of the personal roles each of us–as members of a shared society–can play in acting productively to repair and revitalize what many see as an unhealthy, eroding civil society. We cannot leave our problems simply to ‘government’ or to others.” http://tagdef.com/wbos Try […]
encoded: I quote: “Short for #WeBuildOurSociety, it’s a tag deliberately created to remind us of the personal roles each of us–as members of a shared society–can play in acting productively to repair and revitalize what many see as an unhealthy, eroding civil society. We cannot leave our problems simply to ‘government’ or to others.” http://tagdef.com/wbos Try a #WBOS Twitter search: https://twitter.com/search/wbos