Corporations are not sentient entities. They are contracts. They do not "do" things. They do not make decisions. Executives do.
When corporate activity breaks a law or harms people, it means the executives decided to do that.
When a corporation has been fined for something, what you are witnessing is the executives being let off the hook for what they did. Perhaps the prosecutor/regulator wants to keep get big money from corporations after leaving government.
@dcjohnson isn’t the whole point of a corporation to be a legal entity that takes on liability instead of the people who own it? The separation makes some sense when the result is protecting small-business owners from losing their home to the debts of a failing business, or protecting shareholders from liability due to decisions they had no input in, but it should not be allowed to protect decision-makers from liability for harm done in the course of running a successful business
No, not really.
The main point of a corporation is to provide a standard and reliable way for people to more easily and effectively pool their resources to accomplish some goal.
It provides a legal framework for funding enterprises that no one person would likely be able to afford on his own, no matter how good an idea the effort might be.
Things like legal liability are just parts of the framework to sort out how ownership stakes should be treated, but they serve the ends of helping people combine their resources.
@dcjohnson
@ShadSterling It's like using a screwdriver to pry parts apart: it's not what the tool is for, but you can use it when you want to.
That aside, even without pooling from multiple investors corporate structures still allow easier capitalization over and above liability shielding.
@volkris @dcjohnson then why are there so many one-person LLCs where there’s no pooling?
Pooling resources could be done with contracts, standardized if you like, without needing or providing the criminal liability shields corp’s provide. Financial liability for disputes could be limited in the contract so no participant can lose their home to a dispute.
The thing the laws are needed for is making it so participants can kill people without it being considered a crime.