Thom Hartmann Here with an excerpt from my book "Unequal Protection: How corporations became "people" - and how you can fight back."
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The British first got the idea about the importance of becoming a world power in the late 1400s when they observed the result of Christopher Columbus's voyage to America-he brought back slaves, gold, and other treasures. That got Europe's attention and threw Spain full-bore into a time of explosive boom. Then, in 1522, when Ferdinand Magellan sailed all the way around the world, he proved that the planet was a closed system, raising the possibility of tremendous financial opportunity for whatever company could seize control of international trade.
In many of the European countries, particularly Holland and France, consortia were put together to finance ships to sail the seas.
England got into the act a bit late, in 1580, with Queen Elizabeth I becoming the largest shareholder in The Golden Hind, a ship owned by Sir Francis Drake. She granted him "legal freedom from liability," an early archetype for modern corporations.
The investment worked out very well for Queen Elizabeth. There's no record of exactly how much she made when Drake paid her share of the Hind's dividends, but it was undoubtedly vast, since Drake himself and the other minor shareholders all received a 5,000 percent return on their investment. Plus, the queen's placing a maximum loss to the initial investors of their investment amount only made it a low-risk investment to begin with. She also was endorsing an investment model that led to the modern limited-liability corporation.
The queen also often granted monopoly rights over particular industries or businesses in exchange for a fee. The 1624 Statute of Monopolies did away with this ability of the crown, although in the years thereafter the British government used tax laws to produce a similar result for the corporations favored by Parliament or the royal family.
A business can operate at a profit, a break-even, or a loss. If the business is a sole proprietorship or a partnership (owned by one or a few people) and it loses more money than its assets are worth, the owners and the investors are personally responsible for the debts, which may exceed the amount they originally invested. A small-business owner could put up $10,000 of her own money to start a company, have it fail with $50,000 in debts, and be personally responsible for paying off that debt out of her own pocket.
But let's say you invest $10,000 in a limited-liability corporation, and the corporation runs up $50,000 in debts and then defaults on those debts. You would lose only your initial $10,000 investment. The remaining $40,000 wouldn't be your concern because the amount of your investment is the "limit of your liability," even if the corporation goes bankrupt, defaults in any other way, or causes millions of dollars in damage to the environment or even the deaths of people.
Who foots the bill? The creditors-the people to whom the corporation owes money-or the community that was devastated. The company took the goods or services from them, didn't pay, and leaves them with the bill, exactly as if you had put in a week's work and not gotten paid for it. Or it wreaks havoc and death and then simply shuts down, as so many asbestos companies have done recently.
