Re: Re: slanted article "Inside System Storage -- by Tony Pearson"

On 3 October 2010 12:55, Roger Bowler <rogerbowler-/[email protected]> wrote:
> On 25/09/2010 01:02, Paul Raulerson wrote:
>
>> It's all tied up with property rights. I might have alluded to being a bit libertarian, and one of the things most libertarians tend to agree on is that all rights derive from property rights. (The first one, of course, being that you own your body and can whatever the heck you want to do with it. Amazing how many people think they are owned by their country or whatever...)
>
>> If you own something, you should be able to choose whether you want to distribute it, and on what terms.
>
> Except that IBM is not a "you", it is a giant multinational corporation.
>
> You cannot just take principles which are meant to protect the rights of
> individuals, and apply them equally to corporations.

Regrettably the US Supreme Court, followed by those of many other
countries, did just that about a century ago, in a wave of judicial
activism that fabricated from nothing the concept of "legal person",
and applied it to corporations.

Even the extreme libertarian view of property rights based on
"homesteading" has little or nothing to say about corporations.

Ayn Rand wrote quite a bit about companies, but at least she took
pains to distinguish those that were the instantiation of, and always
named after, one person, from those with names like "Associated Steel"
and "Amalgamated Switch and Signal Company, Inc.".

Hmmm... at one point IBM had multiple subsidiaries named Watson
Business Machines.

Tony H.