Corporations were originally a grant of special privileges given by a monarch to reward his loyal supporters. They grew out of the old feudal system of prerogatives and privileges. At the center of that system was the feudal concept of property in which no one but the king owns anything free and clear. All property was held in “tenancy” from the crown, in exchange for services rendered back to the king.
That relationship was then propagated downward. The highest level of aristocrats held their land as tenants of the king, a lower level held their land as tenants of the lords, and so on. Various forms of European common law built up extensive rules about the obligations owed back and forth between the crown, the lords, and their vassals.
This is the context in which corporations were first conceived as just another form of privilege the crown offered to its supporters. In America, and to some extent in Britain and Europe, as the legal remnants of feudalism were being cleaned up, the basis for the law of corporations was changed from one of privileges to one of rights. A corporate charter wasn’t a special favor the sovereign granted in exchange for special services. It was a recognition of free-and-clear ownership of the corporation by its shareholders.
This is what regressive “progressives” have always hated, the concept of free-and-clear ownership, and they have been struggling all along to go back to a neo-feudal system in which all economic activity takes place only with the permission of the sovereign. They merely give it a gloss of democracy by claiming that the sovereign, this time, will be “the people.”
You can get a sense of this neo-feudal approach in the way that corporations, in this proposal, would be attached to the land like medieval serfs, unable to move or change without the permission of the cities and towns where they operate. While in theory this is a way of making corporations answer to “the people” in the same way that feudal barons answered to the king, notice that in practice this proposal gives power to bureaucrats and ambitious, self-promoting politicians.
http://thefederalist.com/2018/08/20...table-capitalism-proof-progressive-feudalism/
That relationship was then propagated downward. The highest level of aristocrats held their land as tenants of the king, a lower level held their land as tenants of the lords, and so on. Various forms of European common law built up extensive rules about the obligations owed back and forth between the crown, the lords, and their vassals.
This is the context in which corporations were first conceived as just another form of privilege the crown offered to its supporters. In America, and to some extent in Britain and Europe, as the legal remnants of feudalism were being cleaned up, the basis for the law of corporations was changed from one of privileges to one of rights. A corporate charter wasn’t a special favor the sovereign granted in exchange for special services. It was a recognition of free-and-clear ownership of the corporation by its shareholders.
This is what regressive “progressives” have always hated, the concept of free-and-clear ownership, and they have been struggling all along to go back to a neo-feudal system in which all economic activity takes place only with the permission of the sovereign. They merely give it a gloss of democracy by claiming that the sovereign, this time, will be “the people.”
You can get a sense of this neo-feudal approach in the way that corporations, in this proposal, would be attached to the land like medieval serfs, unable to move or change without the permission of the cities and towns where they operate. While in theory this is a way of making corporations answer to “the people” in the same way that feudal barons answered to the king, notice that in practice this proposal gives power to bureaucrats and ambitious, self-promoting politicians.
http://thefederalist.com/2018/08/20...table-capitalism-proof-progressive-feudalism/