Notes to Self | Wendell Berry on Corporate Personhood, by Wendy Babiak

Notes to Self | Wendell Berry on Corporate Personhood

Wendell Berry on Corporate Personhood

2 notes

The folly at the root of this foolish economy began with the idea that a corporation should be regarded, legally, as “a person.” But thelimitless destructiveness of this economy comesabout precisely because a corporation is not aperson. A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance. Unlike a person, a corporation does not age. It does not arrive, as most persons finally do, at a realization of the shortness and smallness of human lives; it doesnot come to see the future

as the lifetime of the children and grandchildrenof anybody in particular. It can experience no personal hope or remorse, no change of heart. It cannot humble itself. It goes about its business as if it were immortal, with the single purpose of becoming a bigger pile of money. The stockholders essentially are usurers, people who “let their money work for them,” expecting high pay in return for causing others to work for low pay. The World Trade Organizationenlarges the old idea of the corporation-as-person

by giving the global corporate economy the status of a super-government with the power to overrule nations.

Berry, Wendell; Daly, Herman (2010-04-23). What Matters?: Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth (pp. 185-186). Counterpoint. Kindle Edition.