Corporations shouldn't be able to donate (bribe) to political parties or politicians
I'm drawing a blank as to why corporations should even be allowed to exist.
It's to allowed limited liability investments. E.g. if I want to be a silent partner in Acme Co, I can invest $10k in that corporation by buying stock. My maximum liability is limited to my $10k investment. If Acme Co is up to something shady that I dont know about, I'm not going to lose my life savings if they get sued into bankruptcy.
One alternative would be forcing all investors to either enter into liable partners like buying a partnership at a law practice. The entry cost is quite high, excluding retail investors. It also sharply limits the size of capital intensive business ventures. It's very difficult to start a billion dollar refinery company if you cant sell stock to the general public and are exclusively beholden to individual investors with enough capital to buy-in as liable partners. E.g. the Musks and Bezos of the world.
You could also force investments into bonds where instead of buying stock you lend the company money. The tradeoffs is this hampers reinvestment of dividends by diverting them into bond payments, sharply limiting ROI.
The inherent tradeoff of publicly traded equities is that it's very difficult to identify liable parties for corporate malfeasance. You cant readily say "The 50 million people with shares in Proctor & Gamble are liable if it commits crimes", because how would they even know much less have mens rea?
I'd like to see mandatory liability for C-Suite executives as a way to address this. That way publicly traded equities are still available, and the buck stops somewhere.
Originally the "corporation" status was supposed to be temporary, not permanent AND the entities forming the said corporation were supposed to demonstrate the benefit of their project for the public/citizenry, before being allowed to combine, temporarily...
It's to allowed limited liability investments. E.g. if I want to be a silent partner in Acme Co, I can invest $10k in that corporation by buying stock. My maximum liability is limited to my $10k investment. If Acme Co is up to something shady that I dont know about, I'm not going to lose my life savings if they get sued into bankruptcy.
That's perfectly fine and should be allowed, but why should a corporation have any political or legal benefits beyond their existence? Corporations became weaponized behemoths that wield political power and influence to the point where they are more represented than any actual constituent. That needs to end and there should be no allowed means for a corporation to exert any force on politics as an entity rather than the individual people that make it up. Throw the jews out and fix corporations.
It's a principal-agent problem. If I own one share of Proctor & Gamble, I want PG to earn me as much money as sustainable and feasible. But my care-o-meter is in line with my investment of the current stock price of $153. I'm the principal, and $153 is a rounding error in my portfolio.
Meanwhile some wingnut marketing executive at PG may well make $250k/yr and get invited to all the socialist cool kids parties if she shoves some Woke Politics into PG ads. She's the agent, and she's supposed to be acting in my best interests. However, her incentive to line her own pockets are massively greater than mine. If I double my money I wouldnt even notice my portfolio going up $153. If she doubles her money, she's in the 1% and getting feted at socialist groomer parties.
Corporations lobbying politicians comes into play not because they're a corporation, but because government has arbitrarily large amounts of power and is an incredibly cost effective investment. $50k is a rounding error for a corporate budget, but it will buy millions of dollars in government largesse. If government wasn't a behemoth, lobbying it wouldnt be profitable. It'd be like donating $50k to the election fund for a PTA candidate. It'd be a losing investment because the PTA doesnt have tax gibs to hand out.
You generally dont see principal-agent problems outside of government because most other examples are illegal or simply not worth the risk. E.g. the Dylan Mulvaney Marketing Executive solely did it because the government shields her from prosecution. She wouldnt do it for something non-political like "See how wonderful dogfighting is" because she'd be slammed with a civil lawsuit for breach of fiduciary duty and bankrupted inside of 6 months.
If I had a time machine, brother.
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