If I stole your car and said, 'oopsy I thought I owned it,' without any evidence of owning I'm pretty sure I'd be learning the minimum mandatory sentence for grand theft auto.Becoming a joke? Fuck you too, buddy.
Our legal system is becoming a joke.
-Duncan Black, AKA Atrios
To hell with banks and repossessors; the confiscatory powers of police have been swelling for decades. (Check Balko's archives.) Rather more to the point . . .
Ten percent of black men between age 25 and 29 are in prison at any given time. One third of all black men will go to prison at some point in their lives. We execute innocent people. We execute mentally ill and retarded people. We lock up children.
Our legal system is a mechanism through which the ownership class maintains its status; it is one of the principle means of fomenting continued racial animosity; its vicious policies of Prohibition not only contribute to race animus, but have, through their military counterparts in the "drug war" done grievous injury to the people of other countries, up to and including the assassination of presidents, the funding of decades-long dictatorships, and the ongoing funding of disastrous civil wars. The legal system protects the fictional property rights of fictitious corporate beings while subverting at every turn the property ownership of individuals. Private property developers can seize your home in order . . . not to do anything at all with the property. But though Kelo is a particularly egregious recent example, the taking of private land for mere "public purpose" dates to the fifties.
Becoming?
I don't mean to make too big a deal out of what I suspect to have been no more than an infelicitous turn of phrase, and yet it in this woefully, absurdly brief historical perspective of the systemically and systematically unjust society in which we live, a perspective that seems to have all bad things springing sui generis from the lunar face of Ronnie Reagan or the stroke-victim jaw of George W. Bush, that magnifies the manifold weaknesses of the progressive analysis. They see some bank taking a house without proper documentation, and it suggests to them that Barack Obama should call for a "moratorium on foreclosures." But of course the issue isn't foreclosure at all, which is merely a minor current symptom. The question is ownership. The question is who has a right to his possessions in general in this society. Who owns what? And more importantly, who, or what, owns whom?
74 comments:
such a good post.
seem to be an extraneous "but" in the Kelo sentence.
"Ten percent of black men between age 25 and 29 are in prison at any given time. One third of all black men will go to prison at some point in their lives. We execute innocent people. We execute mentally ill and retarded people. We lock up children."
You say that as if these are some kind of BAD things....
The footprints on your ceiling are almost gone!
so his foot slipped over the line a little, big deal. I don't think it's quite fair to condemn a whole program because of a single slip-up.
you are making perfect the enemy of the good. The alternative is somalia! doncha know. We just need to elect better politicians. The problem is those damn other people who want the bad stuff. I mean, get out the vote! We gotta do something!
How ironic, the state stole my car yesterday. I assure you, the irony of forking over my entire paycheck to the city on Guy Fawkes Day is not lost on me, sir.
But, I'm sure everyone else slept better last night under the knowledge that I was unable to park my car on the 1000 block of Spaight St. for more than 2 hours.
Granted, Fawkes was mad about anti-Catholicism in England, I don't know that he had any particular qualms with the institution of the state generally... But, seeing as I am at least ethnically Catholic, I'm gonna roll with this line of indignation anyways.
Stupid system of Just Ice. Always performing perfectly until Some Liberal's Friend gets pinched, and then ... and then ... it's GOT A FLAW!
But only a small one. Totally fixable.
By arresting and jailing more Black guys, of course!
You forgot about this, and you forgot about that
'Cause you got to get back to what you doing
The most egregiously draconian drug laws in the brief history of our republic were passed at the behest of uber-liberals Nelson Rockefeller in New York and Tip O'Neil at the federal level... so they could "look tough" don't you know.
Our court system, designed to give the imprimatur of not only correctness and "legality", but "justice," by rubber-stamping the outcomes that the rich and powerful desire, and then handing their pronouncements it down in that cool religious way by priests and priestesses in black robes in buildings resembling Greek or Roman temples... IS THE COOLEST THING I CAN THINK OF for this purpose. Very "formal" and so forth...
Ever thus, of course; Duncan, et al., still believe... but with at least two more years of middle-manager Barack at the helm of the complaint department... I'm sure many more will come round to acknowledging reality.
You sneer now, but you just wait until some weed-crazed New London homeowner starts rattling your windows at 4 in the morning, emboldened by the fact that the bank hasn't repo'd his car yet.
Quite reminiscent of the oft-heard phrase (usually after the GOP wins an election) that democracy is now broken in this country. Compared to what, mofos?
IOZ, the rights of corporations are just as real as the rights of individuals. A corporation, like any collective, proxies the rights of its owners. Stealing from a corporation is wrong because stealing from individuals -- its owners -- is wrong. Or, take the right to speak freely: you have it, and it proxies into a corporation. This is the essence of the recent Citizens United decision, so anathemized by the left.
So, unless you want to go the route of rejecting rights in toto, which obviously you do not, please stop it with this particular leftist canard. You can, of course, claim that all rights are fictions, and I would agree! (Useful fictions, but fictions nonetheless.) But I don't think that is really what you are trying for here.
@Leonard - My dog and my house will be thrilled to know that my ownership invests them with all the rights of a person.
As for the larger question you ask, well, Lenin put it more succinctly: Who? Whom?
The answer is a consequence of our form of government. In democratic theory, everyone collectively owns everything. Who? All of us! To whom? All of us! In practice, it is more sordid: who? Intellectuals and their client vote-banks! Screwing whom? The people who create wealth! Either way, there is no such thing as rights, except maybe voting rights. Now, it is true that our democracy is not pure; we still have a great many anti-democratic relics of the original Constitutional republic. But they are losing power all the time. This is the real reason why our legal system is "becoming" a joke: because it is among those relics. If the people have borrowed money, and want to welch on repayment, well, a democracy should do that. 51% of the people cannot be wrong! That our democracy is not doing that is proof that it is not fully democratic yet.
The irony here is that Duncan Black, a progressive who is supposedly for democracy, should be lamenting the idea of the legal system becoming a joke. No: his every political instinct runs the other way. The legal system, such as remains, is an impediment to democracy and to the rule of professors. As such, he should be applauding it becoming a joke, as an outmoded relic of common law, natural rights, and procedural rights. Well, give him 20 years, and you might see him change.
It is and is not a careless turn of phrase. The inequities of the justice system you cited have been around for a long time but are invisible to (white) middle classes and above because they do not experience it personally. Whenver the justice system comes up, a lot of people, many of whom should/do know better, still assume it is far more equitable than it is. They assume that any injustices are deviations from the norm rather than the norm.
JPL: your dog and your house are not collectives of rights-bearing people. As such they have no rights. (We can waffle about the dog, animal rights being at least arguable.) As your property, they are protected by the law, but this springs from your property rights, not your rights proxied into them.
Soylent Green is made from corporations.
Leonard, I do enjoy your contributions, but I have to tell you, a person who writes, without blinking, "a corporation, like any collective, proxies the rights of its owners," reveals himself as a person with a very . . . shall we say academic notion of how businesses really operate, who really owns them, who determines how and to what end they act, and what a corporation actually, as opposed to hypothetically, is. The fact that you can argue with no apparent irony just a few moments later that representative democracy's pretense to proxy some fictional collective will via some process of vote or consensus is a sham (it is) tells us exactly how deeply you've thought about all this, which is to say, not very. But by all means, go on believing that the annual proxy statement you get for the ten GE shares you got for your bar mitzvah represent a real ownership stake. If it makes you happy, then it can't be that bad, as Shakespeare or the Bible wrote.
Leonard:
Shareholders cannot be held accountable for the actions of a limited liability corporation -- that's the only reason to create a corporation in the first place.
If accountability does not flow from the choices of an agent to the principal, then why on Earth would a democratic society have any reason to allow the rights of the principal to carry over to the agent?
Sorry Leonard, tldr. Lulz.
Great post Monsieur!
Law and Justice are the thin blue line that stands between me and the drug-crazed swarthy and dusky people who are jealous of my freedoms and want to take away my right to vote. Liberal activist judges prevent more of those people from being locked up.
If it makes you happy, then it can't be that bad, as Shakespeare or the Bible wrote.
Why do you insist on getting shitty songs stuck in my head?
No one owns anything. The whole concept is meaningless and absurd. Unfortunately we all live entirely within the bounds of that absurdity, which makes big powerful people stealing things from little powerless people damn awful.
Big Head Black and the Pwog-Monsters recently met with the Preznit and pressed him about ending DADT! What have you done, huh, buddy?
It all belongs to Caesar and the Lord. The rest just administer on deys behalf, if it please the court.
Not only do we get a recipe, but IOZ's channeling Mr. Thornton Melon in the comments as well.
Not a bad way to kick off the weekend.
Thorton Melon explains.
IOZ: as if you have some more insightful idea of how businesses operate? Doubt it. But yes: when one discusses rights, which are, after all, fictions used to organize our thinking about righteous human action, it is proper to be academic. Rights are academic notions. Rights are, in other words, a sham, just as is righteousness, and the "collective will of the people". Reality is only tenuously connected to any of these things.
There are two very important differences between a corporation and democracy. In a corporation, ownership is alienable, indeed, salable. My "share" in USCorp is not (at least not without expatriating myself). Second, in a corporation, the benefits of ownership are divided equally by share ownership. Benefits are divided highly unevenly in democracy. My "ownership" of USCorp gets me far less than most other owners: I am one of the net taxpayers. Indeed, I feel that owning USCorp is in fact negative for me, although one can quibble about that depending on what you allow as the alternatives.
There's another important difference: unlike democracy, corporations are coherent. The owners have an actual common end: profit. (Owners who do not share that end have every incentive to sell, and will over time become rare.) Not only is profit singular, it is also calculable. By contrast, democracy has no real common good; there is fundamental disagreement on almost every aspect of policy. And even things we mostly agree on, we can rarely measure even poorly. How many utils of good has USCorp done in Iraq?
You are correct that there is no significant difference in the effectiveness of my non-voting in proxy elections for GE's CEO, and my ineffective-but-moral voting for USCorp's upper management. But nonetheless there is a very real difference between my ownership of both: I can sell my stake in GE, and cease to be involved with them. And also, they do not tax me for the privilege of ownership. Rather the opposite: they pay me. That is why my hypothetical Jewish grandmother gave me those 10 shares on my non-existent bar mitzvah, and why I own them yet. They were intended to be a blessing, and, they were. An unmixed blessing, unlike the membership in USCorp my parents foisted on me.
Or let me put that another way: my real ownership stake of 10 shares of GE is currently worth $166.80, minus broker fees and taxes. You may call that peanuts, but you cannot say it is nothing.
Love you, but: "not very" right back at you.
As if we would ever dream of taking your bullshit money?
"The owners have an actual common end: profit."
Lulz, bro. Other than owners, have, actual, common, end, and profit, you're definitely on point here. Beats Lillian Hellman, if ya know whaduhmean.
...Justice Roberts reinforcing the dike against the apocalyptic swell of his demon-tormented conscience...
"How many utils of good has USCorp done in Iraq?"
Well, if profit is a beneficial end, that particular venture seems to have made quite a return for its owners.
Rights are a useful fiction. Now lets talk about corporations and democracy.
AAAHAHAHA. Quick Leonard, define "ownership." Whatya call a democratic vote in a shareholders meeting of a state-created corporation? Lulz...
More think. Fewer Words.
So much shitty law would have to be changed for the Frog's view to prevail. None for Leonard's.
Frog: the exclusive right to possess, enjoy, and dispose of a thing.
IOZ: Other than "other" and "than", you're right.
Picador: good question. I think the answer is that (a) democracies want the taxes; limited liability gets them more of that, by encouraging very large-scale corporations, and (b) there are many other ways to avert corporate mischief.
Nonetheless, your question is not a matter of rights theory (i.e., an "academic" matter as IOZ would have it). Rights-theory has little to say about accountability (i.e. punishment). It is a question about real-world policy; of practicality. There are some corporate forms (i.e., partnerships) which do not limit liability. The main form used by large corporations does limit liability, essentially as a privilege granted by the state. This form worked well where it was invented, and was widely copied elsewhere in the world, presumably because they wanted to get rich, too.
OMuhG, please explain how limited liability, by encouraging very large-scale corporations, increases tax revenue.
You're out of your element.
Leonard, sweetheart, you are denser than lead. I was hoping, but did not actually think that you would respond with a definition of ownership as a "right," since your entire discussion of ownership followed your haughty discarding of rights as fanciful nonsense.
And partnerships are partnerships. Corporations are corporations. Really easy.
You are all over the fucking map here man, bordering on incoherence. Lay off the coke for 24 hours. It'll pass.
Same goes for you David, apparently.
"OMuhG, please explain how limited liability, by encouraging very large-scale corporations, increases tax revenue."
You know, a lotta ins, lotta outs, lotta what-have-yous.
All the Dude ever wanted was a reasonable indemnification clause.
Sr. Frog,
You must have read my brief comment to mean that I thought tons of bad law (leading to corporate personhood) should not be changed. I meant the opposite.
-Scolomin (David)
I find myself a little fatootsed by the mishegas of trying to keep straight all the junk people say about (natural) rights. I mean, for human rights are a fictitious creation of stupid liberals, but property rights are imbedded in the fabric of the universe. Except when they don't already exist, like in Peru, in which case, like God, they have to be invented.
Rana, casting aspersions on intelligence is just the sort of ad-hom nasty one expects from an inferior intelligence. You do not have that excuse, so it is quite disappointing. I suggest that, when arguing in good faith, you try to respond to the best interpretation of what your opponent may mean, rather than simply projecting on him the worst possible interpretation then sneering at it.
Yes, ownership is a right. I gave you a straight up definition from m-w.com. Do you dispute it? No, of course not. And yes, rights are fictions -- of a sort. I said so quite explicitly. But contra your projection, I have hardly discarded them. They are very useful fictions. Now, how can this circle be squared? Your homework. Argue in good faith and I am happy to discuss it with you.
IOZ: there are some projects that are inherently large-scale. Building railroads is an example. For smaller companies, it is quite reasonable to be able to raise the capital via only large investors, that is, those capable of owning enough of the company to make it worth their while to know what it is doing, such that it is reasonable to apply liability to them. But for a very large company, or for small investors, or both, you simply cannot raise all of the capital from large investors. You need masses of small investors; and they were certainly there to be had in the burgeoning middle classes of the industrial revolution. But a man who owns 10 shares of GE has no economic motive to know what the company is doing; and if you apply significant liability to his type, you can see you may get no small investors. In this case, there are large capital projects that simply won't get done, because nobody can raise the capital to attempt them, even though they would pay off, and the capital would be there given limited liability. That is why there are taxes to be had, simply by changing the rules.
'Course, you don't really need me to explain that to you. There is, you know, wikipedia. The development of limited liability facilitated the move to large-scale industrial enterprise, by removing the threat that an individual's total wealth would be confiscated if invested in an unsuccessful company. Large sums of personal financial capital became available, and the transferability of shares permitted a degree of business continuity not possible in other forms of enterprise.
Nony: property rights are human rights. And vice-versa, too, looked at sideways.
Leonard, I have to explain to you that everyone can still see the comments you previously posted.
Similarly, I have to explain to you that there's a nose on your face.
"Stealing from a corporation is wrong because stealing from individuals -- its owners -- is wrong."
Is stealing bottled water wrong?
"There is an endless supply of white men. There has always been a limited number of human beings"
Corporations*, so transparently dependent as they are on the beneficence of the state, do raise revenue (wealth) insofar as they sanction the forced channeling of human activity toward material accumulation.
This has been obvious since the East India Company which was obviously created by pwoggies on or about 1600.
You fuckers are so predictable.
Now, watch this drive.
--the real Donny.
*As opposed to the poor schmuck who writes off his auto and his rec room as a "company expense". Oh my, the clever bastard, working so hard to protect private property.
"But though Kelo is a particularly egregious recent example, the taking of private land for mere "public purpose" dates to the fifties."
Ah, yes. That explains the 5th Amendment (probably written by pwoggies, too).
The Vardon grip sucks.
--the real Donny.
So, Lennie my boy, you believe in a human right to property, do you? I think your construction of the word "universal" may not be universal.
rather than simply projecting on him the worst possible interpretation then sneering at it.
Isn't that, like, the mission statement of this here blawg?
I read this here blog for its willingness to address the really fucked up aspects of the present. (Also for the lulz.) The aspects I'm talking about are those that, properly taken into account, destroy the credibility of any progressivist narrative of history, from the Right or the Left.
Having said that, I find myself generally more at ease with anarchists or leftists, at least at the level of their thinking, since they at least seem to recognize the real, proactive actors in this mess of an era we have in our hands (“whaddawegonnado”, etc.).
And no, Leonard, the real actors aren't "professors" or "intellectuals" (not to minimize the role of figures like Von Hayek or Buchanan in enabling the current Market Stalinist paradigm, but in the grand scheme of things they are seconds couteaux at best). If you’re capable of apprehending the dangers of State-based concentrations of power, no doubt I shouldn’t need to point out the parallel (intertwined) perils of Private accumulations of the same.
You had the right to yell "hey" when your stove blew up. You have the right to be upset? Why, yes...
I bet the shareholders of IBM get just as worked up over Chair and Director elections as the hoi polloi get over congresscritter and POTUS elections, eh Leonard?
Good thing that it's all democratic, and shit, after buying the Secret Decoder Ring (transactional evidence of the "purchase" of "share(s) in" Wondrous Democratic Business Entity, Ltd.
Great post.
I agree with that useful fiction guy. Everything is real.
@j-ho
I thought Fawkes WAS a Catholic??
???? Huh?
"The most egregiously draconian drug laws in the brief history of our republic were passed at the behest of uber-liberals Nelson Rockefeller in New York and Tip O'Neil at the federal level... so they could "look tough" don't you know."
@ the talking dog
american culture (not only political culture) is constantly looking for a class that it would be ok to kill, to hate. ie., "well, kin we lynch THIS ONE"?
Diagnose cancer, treat the heartburn...
Holy crap, I can't believe some of you seem to have read some of those screeds in their entirety.
Seriously, can't one of you just come over and make me a sandwich next time? It'll be just as silly an endeavor but with a modicum of utility.
Ahem, NoT
The man shall not live by sandwich alone.
Capt'n Obvious
"Everything is real."
Nothing is real. Everything is important. Everything is real. Nothing is important. Jesus is True Hope. Bob is True Hope. Jesus is True Bob. Jesus is Bob Hope.
Need I go on?
useful... its so, non normative
sandwich is useful fictions
love is useful emotion
peace is useful, uh, being...
Scholastical debates about property and rights aside, Duncan Black's initial riposte is just plain stupid on the facts. Unlike Black himself in his hypo, Wells Fargo has no culpable mental state, at least where "theft" is concerned. They thought they had a repo, and messed up on the record-keeping. She has tort claims for damages. When Wells starts sending out flunkeys to steal bread for hungry shareholders, the rest of this won't be inapposite.
I'm with Inkberrow, Armageddon is at hand.
Inky, did you really just use "inapposite" in a setting other than a 1st year associate's first draft of a research memo to a junior partner?
Charles F.---
I wouldn't know. But you sure ascribe a Talismanic Significance to certain boilerplate conceptions.
Having once been a first year associate grappling with whether to use the word "inapposite" or some fewer-syllabled synonym, I can say that the talismanic significance precedes me by decades, and given the number of decades since I was a first year associate the importance grows even further distant in the past.
In the end, de minimis non curat lex, and I care even less!
"Wells Fargo has no culpable mental state"
Progress! God, where can I suck on that? Ain't it fucking amazing? Now we have 'persons' with no 'culpable mental state'.
Is really real? Only the Shadow knows.
--a sorta' Donney
Anon @ 11:46---
Wells Fargo's agents had no culpable mental state to commit the crime of theft, which was the gravaman (hey Charles F.!) of Black's faulty comparison.
inky,
then if we all incorporate, all is forgiven! nirvana!
Anon @ 8:23---
Try to concentrate now. "Theft" is "forgiven", because not committed. Civil liability remains for the undoubted harms done.
Any questions?
Inky,
so "gravamen" is plural?
No, I got the spelling wrong as you noticed (great word though, eh?). That's why YOU were the first-year associate and I the chalk salesman.
Selling chalk is better than selling bat guano.
"Our legal system is a mechanism through which the ownership class maintains its status;"
yes, yes, and yes. this is stated explicitly over a century ago in Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent (also a finer Terrorism resource than most books kicking around today). sure, Conrad was something of a political reactionary (see also Dostoevsky), but stupid he wasn't.
I'd say the taking of land for 'public purposes' in this hemisphere goes back quite a bit further. 1492ish?
I am glad to post my views and points in this blog, Blogs are becoming the main source of knowing about things certainty,its importance,idolizing,either in a marketing way that one can differentiate. I enjoyed to be at here because one of my point has been cleared here.
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