Corporations and People

Corporations can kill other corporations or enslave them through hostile takeovers or leveraged buyouts. They are not people. We have laws to prevent people from acting this way towards other people. And if they break these laws, they end up in jail, sometimes for life.

Instead, we treat corporations very differently. When Bain Capital under Mitt Romney changed its business model from venture capital to leveraged buyouts and his corporation enslaved several other corporations before selling them at a great profit, Wall Street cheered and established Mitt as the king of leveraged buyouts.  Everyone else started calling him a very successful business man. If you measure a successful business by profits and personal executive wealth alone, this is a true assessment. Unfortunately, non-productive use of large debt positions like those incurred in leveraged buyouts are risky. A widespread application of highly leveraged debt at all levels of our economy is what caused the collapse of our financial system in 2008.

Capitalism, the way we play it, is a game of financial Darwinism. If we apply this game to real people as well as corporations, it is social Darwinism. I like to call the associated political system, Corpocracy. Some think its just the mean side of libertarianism. Others would call it an example of Ayn Rand's "objectivism".

Rick Perry recently called Mitt's leveraged-buyout model, "vulture capitalism". I like that even better. It's too bad the Democrats can't dream up tags like this. We might have a more balanced governing system.