"God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion.
The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is
wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts
they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions,
it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. ...
And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not
warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of
resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as
to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost
in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from
time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
It is its natural manure." T Jefferson
It is time for bloodless evolution,
是时候发表新的《独立宣言》了。
Time to renew our rights, our freedoms,
Time to rewrite a new constitution,
One built on the foundation of truth,
With liberty and justice of One
As is All.
=

Read your post on this issue twice and thought about it a lot before commenting. Corporations were enabled by democracy. I think that is a fair statement, without storming through all of the historic latitudes that got us here. Wealthy people, such as George Soros, Warren Buffet and others probably do not spend time thinking about the relationship(s) between democracy and corporations. They have more important things to do, i.e., making big money. And so, to keep this brief, your proposition is somewhere between moot and irrelevent (or is that: irrelevant---I can never remember these spellings.) Surely, (or is that Shirley?)someone will disagree...

Another scary aspect of corporations - that I think ends up getting in the way of democracy - is their promise to shareholders to do whatever they can to increase profits. In a sense, corporations are breaking this agreement when they choose to act in the interests of, say, the environment, or the population as a whole. In this way, capitalism overruns democracy. Actions are made in the interest of profit for those involved, without concern for future consequences. Big oil companies, for example, skirt environmental regulations and pay fines as part of doing business. They can make more money by polluting and paying the fines for it. I'd like to think that if any one person were in charge of making such decisions, he or she wouldn't choose to do the things Big Oil does (the laundry list is terribly long, but most outrageous, I think, is Shell, who after polluting the Niger delta for 50 years, violently suppressed those protesting their actions). It is the corporate mindset of needing to maximize profit that leads to these atrocities.

The Latins proscribed corporations because they militated against the 'Patris Familias', or power of public voice or right to represent oneself in court. Democracy developed directly out of the Anglo-Saxon 'Open Field System' and the Anglo-Saxon courts in which a jury of interested parties was appointed to resolve questions of tort or crime. In both cases unanimity was the rule. Once majority rule became the norm democracy was bound to be vulnerable to faction. It is amazing how paranoid the framers of the Constitution were about what they called 'combines'. A corporation was a 'patent' or a limited sovereignty given a kind lf legislative autonomy by the crown to pursue its interests in lieu of direct royal authority, such as the East India Company, or the royal grants by which the American colonies were organized. Democracy is a means by which weaker voices can make an end-run around the powerful to appeal to the people for recognition of their true interests. Faction is the prime obstacle to such a direct connection of the people to their own power and authority as a community. At the time of the founding, corporations were licensed by the states, and were required to limit their activities to specifically sought and officially approved goals and extent, both in the nature of the aims and in the capital requirements and expectations. To exceed these preconditions was to violate the license which would be withdrawn under a writ of 'quo warranto'. After the Civil War the Supreme Court was packed with pro-industry judges who blatantly misapplied the Fourteenth Amendment as protecting corporate rights, while all but ignoring its real meaning to protect the civil rights of freed slaves. Today, corporations go way beyond claiming the rights of person. The concept of corporate standing in courts of law originated as a need to have some body present to answer to charges against such bodies. Hence was invented the notion of the 'fictional person' . This is now become a person is such a full bodied sense that real persons are of diminished if not negligible standing in courts against them. They also claim the kind of extreme rights over capital property that was never claimed heretofore save for intensely personal items. They have thrown a blanket of personal property rights over the most publicly vital capital and real properties, as if they should have the same rights over vital commercial resources that they do over their family snapshots.
Just a few facts that might clarify the issue.

Democracy: We vote for those to govern and rule over us and then complain about our loss of freedom. =

每当有富人或公司发言人谴责政府干预(至圣)市场时，我不得不憋住辛辣的笑声。“当有限责任完全建立在国家的断言上，即政府不会帮助债权人收回一些高于股票价值的债务时，这些债务是由公司虚构的“承保”(在很大程度上是在加尔文主义的soteriology意义上)的实际人所承担的——事实上，国家将积极防止或惩罚任何此类企图. ...至于富有的个人，请想一想，如果没有一个国家来强制执行财产权，那么大量的财产积累是多么罕见，而某些形式的财产，特别是知识产权和广泛的土地财产，如果没有一个国家来大声疾呼，而不是对他们应有的嘲笑，是不可能的。