a plug Instapundit points to the blog of Stuart Buck, which I also like very much. I especially like this piece on corporate malfeasance. Too often people on both the left and the right equate capitalism with corporatism. Most libertarians and randroids are unflinching supporters of corporations, either from the it's-not-the-government reflex or some sort of Reardenian reverence. I made the mistake of broaching the topic on a libertarian chatlist once -- it went over about as well as my IP ideas. But I can't get past the following points: (1a) I'm not convinced that corporate limited liability is a good idea. Someone asked this question on the Armchair Economist mailing list the other day, and the answer received was pretty wishy-washy -- it listed the benefits but ignored the costs. (1b) Relatedly, I'm not convinced that the separation of "ownership" from management is a good idea. As we've seen recently (and not so recently), it leads to all sorts of incentive problems. Most answers somehow involve my grandmother -- why should she, as an "owner" of Enron, be responsible for its misbehavior? Why should she lose more than her original investment? But owners of dogs are punished when people get hurt. Sure, it's true that my grandmother has less control over Enron than the dog owner does over her pet. This seems all the more reason to question the corporate structure. Who does have control over the corporation? (2) I'm not convinced that allowing the aggregation of arbitrarily large amounts of capital is a bad idea. The corporate structure allows for immensely wealthy "entities" which are accountable to almost no one and -- often as not -- collude with governments to get what they want. David Korten claims that Adam Smith thought the same thing, though I don't have time to look it up right now. -- My thoughts on this are somewhat half-baked -- they're really in the identifying the problem stage. Most of the questioning of corporatism comes from the far left. David Korten's When Corporations Rule the World was maddening -- full of spot-on diagnoses and ludicrously wrong prescriptions. So I find it heartening to read criticism coming from more economically sensible corners.