“As a consequence of all the foregoing, a half-millennium after Roland a new and overwhelmingly greater form of invisible seagoing and land-strutting giants appeared on planet Earth. This was a legally contrived, abstract giant —”legal” because the physically uncontradictable “topsword” king decreed it was legal. Having the most favored privileges accorded real humans, the giant, abstract, corporate “man” is inventively created in 1390 in England. (The corporate “human” may have been invented in ancient Babylon to cover the potentates’ voyaging venture, but we have as yet no written record of such.) “His” abstract name is the “Merchant Venturers Society.” This composite man was formed by the king of England with a small group of his very powerful friends, who lorded over their king-deeded vastlands.
By royal prerogative, the venture-financing riskers could not be held liable for any losses of the venture. With limited liability, individuals might sue the company but not the human individuals who underwrote the venture If the enterprise failed and went bankrupt, its shareholders lost their ventured stake but were not to be held responsible in any way for its debts. The creditors of the company were the losers, and not the shareholders. Bankruptcy could reflect no credit stigma upon the companies’ shareholders. The shareholders were held absolutely blameless for any misfortunes of their ships’ crew or for damage caused by collision of their ship with another ship. If the ship and its cargo were lost, the shareholders lost their original shares, but no more. As long as the ship operated successfully, the shareholders shared its trading profits
Whether the ship was lost or not, the banker who loaned the gold for the merchant ship’s trading held the life-support-producing lands and their cattle as collateral. Since many voyages ended in disaster, the banker occupied a long-time, steadily profitable position in the overall merchant venturing—and as yet does.
Naturally, the shareholder’s limited-liability advantage, granted by sovereign decree, encouraged a swift expansion of such enterprises…….
….Employing her sovereign power, Elizabeth limited the losses of its chartered riskers to their initial monetary or equivalent capital stakes, while continuing their right to receive their proportional profit dividends for as long as the venturing company might exist—in perpetuity.
Known later in England as “Ltd.” (for “limited liability”), in France as “Societe en Commandite,” in Germany as “Kommanditgesellschaft,” and as “Corporation” under the U.S.A.’s “Inc.” (for incorporated) status, this newborn abstract legal giant was to be treated as a human personality, empowered to do anything humans can do but also accredited to operate as an abstract, legal entity able to enter or leave any nation without a passport. As such it was able to employ millions of people and any amount of money, tools, buildings, and equipment, and to perform its giant acts anywhere about the oceanic world exclusively for the profit in perpetuity only of its shareholders.
When the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S.A. Constitution was passed in the post-Civil War railroad-expansion days, the U.S. Supreme Court required that the individual states grant the corporation all the privileges and protection granted to human citizens. A hundred years later, in 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a corporation had the same rights of free speech as all U.S. citizens…..”
Grunch of Giants, Chapter III, Buckminster Fuller
