Limited liability is NOT a special privilege. It is in fact available to all individuals who declare themselves bankrupt to get free of lifelong debt.

This is because everyone's liability is limited to their assets.

The bundled assignability of corporations is a great invention, 100% compatible with Rand's philosophy. I have explained this all in the essay linked above.

In cases of corporate misconduct, courts do look at the individuals involved and hold them responsible.

Regulation is a different matter.

Really? No special privileges? Then please address these excerpts from the article I linked to above:

“Unfortunately, all modern economies have specific sets of rules for corporations — rules that are distinct from and often opposite to those for individuals and other types of organizations. These rules violate free-market norms in two major ways: as all libertarians know, they require corporations to submit to intrusive government oversight and regulation of their activities; and as not all libertarians fully realize, they give corporations special privileges that are not granted to unincorporated firms or individuals.

“Chief among these special privileges is ‘limited liability,’ designed to shield owners of corporations from financial risk relating to corporate negligence or misbehavior. Although libertarians disagree about the extent to which individual stockholders should be held responsible for corporate misconduct, that is not the issue here. The issue instead is that, by granting limited liability to owners of corporations and denying it to unincorporated firms, the government is creating a double standard in the marketplace, one that favors corporations over individuals.

“Corporations have additional ways of avoiding the consequences of their wrongful actions. Suing a corporation is a difficult, expensive and time-consuming process — much more so than suing another person. A corporation can easily dissolve or go bankrupt, even as its owners continue to prosper. A judge’s approval is usually needed to ‘pierce the corporate veil’ and sue the owners directly. Such approval can be difficult or impossible to obtain, especially in jurisdictions that advertise themselves as friendly to corporations.

“Since corporations can own, buy, and sell one another, a privilege rightly denied to individuals, it is easy to establish a chain of corporate ownership to conceal the identity of the true owners, by setting up the controlling corporations in different domestic jurisdictions or in other countries.

“These state-granted corporate privileges come at a steep price — to our economic freedom as well as to corporations themselves. Corporations are brought into existence by legislative permission. They can be snuffed out of existence just as easily through government revocation of their charters. This gives governments tremendous power to regulate corporations as they see fit, and encourages corporate decision makers to seek the ‘friendship’ of powerful government agencies and do their bidding. The result is a toxic blend of crony capitalism and a ‘mixed’ economy, within which the marketplace is anything but free.

The competitive advantages conferred by government permit corporations to grow larger than they would in a free market, ‘crowding out’ other types of business organizations in the process. Eventually we arrive at an economic landscape dominated by corporate executives and their regulators, at the expense of everyone else’s freedom.”

Nicely stated, TomB666.

It's a great thing that corporations are entities at law. There are no special privileges that flow from this. The problems of cronyism stem from the fact that fascism is introduced at the state level.

See: https://www.thesavvystreet.com/is-the...

Corporations, as they exist today, have no legitimate place in a free-market economy. They are government-created artificial "people" that enjoy special privileges in exchange for their submission to intrusive government oversight and regulation. See https://libertyunbound.com/a-free-mar...

Dead right. Well put.

Stakeholder - a made up term describing a whiny baby with no skin in the game who insists he is entitled to make the rules and will pout and fuss if you don't let him. Stakeholder Capitalism is an oxymoron.
( I posted this definition on another site as well.)

Thank you. Feel free to share.

As usual:
Very well articulated, Vinay.
Thank you.

Thank you, Commander, for the compliment, and the insightful comments.

Good one: Under Socialism, everything is free,,,but the shelves are empty....

Like, to boost GDP, government construct great big projects like long distance trains to carry ghosts from nowhere to nowhere.

By the way, subscriptions to Savvy Street are free.
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Thank you, Katrina. Your phrase defining the Great Reset is perfectly worded.

When I am fed pablum like "Stakeholder Capitalism", I always remember the scene from Dr. Zhivago where upon the good Dr's return from a trip, he finds that his home has been divided up by the Comrades to house dozens of "Stakeholders". The comrades allow the Dr to keep one room for himself and his family.

As I have stated here numerous times: Under Socialism, everything is free,,,but the shelves are empty....

Thank you, Vinay, for a great post. Now, when we hear those popular words, "The Great Reset", we know exactly what they mean. Simply said, they mean the evential end of ownership of any kind.

To change a definition is deceitful, whether through ignorance or malice.
Rand: Definitions are the guardians of rationality, the first line of defense against the chaos of mental [dis-integration].
The more "definitions" regarding a subject, the more uncertainty, the more opportunity to control the mind through narrative.
From Claude Shannon: Some messages "resolve uncertainty." These are "information messages." All other messages are "noise."
IMR/TMR=U
(Information Messages Received ÷ Total Messages Received equals Uncertainty)

Which poses the question: Are "we", as a global human group, educated in a methodology of evaluating Information v Noise?....rhetorical.

Thanks for an insightful essay.

Indeed.

Yep...that's how china operates.

Thank you for those insightful comments.

I recall the people who were good at talking rather than producing using expressions like stakeholder this and stakeholder that and triple-bottom-line.
Sciency sounding stuff like quantitative easing and aggregate demand, still gives me the cringe.

Triple-bottom-line is good for describing what government owned utilities do (actually, do not do). It is used to cover the fact that despite high charges no profit is made, they claim to be producing unique intangibles.

Nikki Haley, yes, a name I hope to hear more of.