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Company towns are well-recorded history, not science fiction. Lost Hills California (home of Wonderful Pistachios) exists in the real, present, non-fictional world.
The same thing can be said about any autocratic government, but the practical and documented historical issues are why they are not liked. Just as dictatorship works well when you have a good ruler who cares about the people, the issue isn't if you get a bad ruler, but when.
Unsurprisingly, it did not last.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C4%81na%CA%BBi
Sure you can. You just have to sell them some land as part of it.
What is the smallest subplot you can split a parcel into?
And are we talking literally land, or would condo ownership suffice? (After all, you typically stack a few condos on top of one parcel of land). The smallest condo is probably dictated by some pesky human habitability rules, but what class of property has the fewest minimum-square-footage zoning rules? Retail probably has egress rules, but what about industrial spaces?
Could you create an industrial park to house a bunch of, to use a rough metaphor, independently-owned/independently-operated phone booths (or whatever other "qualifying use")?
Basically is there a category of land-use you could split ownership off at ridiculous scale, offer LLC-as-a-service to buy a bunch of them, and just for fun, tokenize the votes to provably aggregate the absentee ballots at scale via blockchain?
If it's one-entity-one-vote, what is the most cost-effective way to maximize the number of qualifying entities?
Bonus points for every order of magnitude of synthetic votes you can reasonably achieve over the fleshy variety.
how many votes in that district do I have?
There is no right for non-residents of a city to vote in that city elections just because they own property there. Owning that property via a LLC shouldn't change that.
I'm being sarcastic because I don't like it. Corporations are a simulacrum of people, and at best, their personhhood a useful legal fiction under very limited number of scenarios.
> I appreciate that Plaintiff may disagree with Delaware’s policy of authorizing certain municipalities to allow voting on behalf of entity property owners. Visions of faceless large corporations or even HAL, 55 controlling a small town are frightening and the stuff of science fiction. However, Plaintiff has not demonstrated that this policy violates the principle of one person/entity/one vote.
how do they do that?
* Start an LLC/C-corp for a trivial amount of money.
* Purchase land, but instead of paying with it via a personal check, you need a touch of foresight so you can "capitalize" the corporation you just started. Write the check from the corporation, instead of your personal checkbook.
Say, Wyoming or West Virginia. Gemini guesses $180 billion to $250 billion.
With that investment, they'd get to control who lives in the state.
So, then the corporation gets to control who the Governor is. And the two Senators, and the seat in the Congress.
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but doesn't a single Senator have just a tremendous amount of power to block basically any legislation? With pocket vetoes, or silent filibusters?
Granted, actually buying a Senator is probably cheaper by a few orders of magnitude.
The Constitution also overrides any attempt to prevent interstate migration.
Sure, but if there is no where you can legally stay, because the sole landowner prohibits it, how do you migrate?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Florida_Tourism_Oversi...
Plus, the way things are going with conservatives pushing hard for federalism, owning local matters could become more important, anyway. You might be onto something...
That ruling is predicated on the state having control over corporations and how they behave. This ruling in Delaware is affirming a clear path for corporations to have control over the state (county, city etc).
With this ruling, it affirms a corporations ability to form air tight rule over municipal governments and operate them as they see fit. Once a corporation manufactures a majority vote in this municipality, they can then amend any rules they see fit, install their own executive leadership and have removed any corporate control over it.
In the thin sense these are both jurisdictions controlling how corporations behave, but one cedes complete control to corporations and the other vastly limits a corporation's ability to exert political control.
The actual grievance seems to be unrelated to the corporation itself. People just associate “corporations” with rich people, and they won’t want rich people to vote.
But it would likely lead to other problems because the owner demographics are generally out of touch.
I don't think anyone would object to a rich person casting a single vote and maybe putting a bumper sticker on their car or a sign in their yard. The issue people take with the rich and politics is the outsized influence they wield in elections. The whole "one person one vote" thing falls apart when the rich can throw millions at advertisements and millions at the "charities" run by the politicians they bought.
If you're only for free speech as long as it doesn't change people's minds, we have very different perspectives.
First, the rich have unimaginably more power in changing people's minds. This isn't sitting down at a bar and having a chat with hank to try to convince him to vote on prop 99. It is the wealthy putting their opinions on your phone, television, and billboards, reminding you of it multiple times per day. If politics is truly a contest of ideas, then the playing field needs to be level so that the ideas can be evaluated fairly, rather than it simply being a contest of who can buy enough ad space to brainwash people to vote against their interests.
Second, the wealthy don't have to change people's minds. They can purchase politicians by "donating" to them, going to million-dollar-per-plate dinners hosted by them, directly giving them money by staying in their hotels, etc. You don't have to convince a politician that they should vote on prop 99, you just need to pay them however much they want for their vote.
If the wealthy had exactly as much power in politics as a fireman or nurse, then I'd be all for their participation.
Much of the discourse on this topic involves muddled, contradictory thinking that simultaneously argues "corporations aren't people" and "corporations are exercising autonomous agency as singular entities distinct from the people who constitute them". These two premises cannot both be true.
So while corporations aren't people, they do seem to be exercising autonomous agency as singular entities distinct from the people who constitute them. Because by definition that is what a limited liability corporation provides? It seems that this is the crux of a lot of angst?
You can act in your capacity as a person and exercise your rights, taking on personal liability.
You can act via a fictive legal proxy, which has no rights and shield yourself from some liability.
Trying to blur those two is madness.
Corporations are an artificial entity that literally anyone can make. Even things like property ownership are somewhat artificial. Lots can generally be split and joined through a process.
This allowance of artificial entities voting seems to open a rabbit hole of secondary issues.
I think it might be more than that
It simply sets a high standard for proving defamation claims by public figures.
Corporations aren't people and don't have rights or votes.
If you want to have a say in the way a place is run, you can do so in your capacity as a person.
If you want to do so from a legal fiction "proxy", fuck off.
... and you can probably come up with a legal way to permanently bind a corporation to vote according to specific rules.
... and larger corporations have totally inhuman internal decision making processes that frequently arrive at conclusions no human would reach.
The purpose of a system is what it does, especially when chances to change or improve that system are ignored.
Similarly, HN is for "interesting discussion" which is why "politics is banned" even though it is explicitly not because the one time we tried to literally ban politics it was self evident how stupid, unworkable, and self defeating of a policy it is, and it lead to zero "interesting discussion", but whatever hype fad is popular right now fills the entire board to capacity at all times, with nothing more than the standard talking points either way, and somehow the 37th post about "AI slop but by a different Substack account nobody has heard of before" is interesting discussion.
"Too many comments for their votes", which is not made transparent to us because god forbid we understand why things happen in our community.
One can imagine all kinds of abusive scenarios with shell corporations created just to get votes, but sounds like the judge thought that these imaginary scenarios were not demonstrated to be actually happening. Courts typically rule only on demonstrated harm or other actual evidence, not "what if" conjectures.
Source: local
And from media/TV corpos, ahem... Mediaset and Atresmedia, there have been internal wars too. Sometimes even with death threats.
And as I said, not just Spain. Germany, France, the Netherlands, even Iceland has tons of shaddy corporate stuff.
Do you know what you get when corporates do what they want with no consecuences? The South of Italy. Because I'm pretty sure the North of Italy it's a gem... polished with the misery of shaddy business from the South.
For sure they must be tons of money laundering down there. Ditto with some barber shops, smartphone cover/case shops, some laundries, kebabs, TONs of bars and pubs in Spain. I have more than 10 bars around me in less than 100 meters around. Think about it, all of them can't be as profitable except for a major main street where everyone hangs out. On average 1 in 10 or 20 bars in around must be selling more than spirits...
If the common folk has to this to survive, just imagine what a billion based corporation could be doing. And the CEO's, welll... pure psychos and OFC with the profiles you would find around Epstein, and not just with pedophilic tendencies -which is power related, not sex-. The small CEO's will resort to cocaine and night clubs with prostitutes. The big ones... just run away from these people. Seriously.
To the extent there’s a problem here, the problem is the municipal charter essentially allows “property to vote.” That seems to be the real problem.
This seems like an obvious problem
Now, to discuss No Taxation Without Representation: we haven’t had proper representation since the number of representatives in the house was capped because we ran out of space for more chairs, so personally I consider that ship has sailed. I would love to get back to a place where We The People had representation. Alas we do not. Let’s start by addressing the absolutely absurd chair problem.
The Town of Fenwick Island mentioned here has a population of 400.
It's high noon for this matter, & about time to start repealing corporate rights. The undoing of this travesty should be a federal project. But hopefully Delaware can course correct themselves, and reverse the mega-threat to humanity they have been unleashing. At least states like Hawaii are heading in the opposite direction already, saying corporations are not people and denying them human speech rights. Potentially immortal easy to spawn companies should indeed not be granted full human rights. https://inequality.org/article/hawaii-targets-citizens-unite...
The City of London and Hong Kong have half of the voting power held by corporations and City of London is older than any US state, and colony. And so are some of the guilds
Universal suffrage at all, and exclusive to natural persons, is more science fiction than corporations voting
Gives more details on the ability of companies to vote in City of London elections.
Before Great Reform the vast majority of British people can't vote, after it all the moderately wealthy men can now vote. So did that result in massive political change, reflecting the newly enfranchised people's preferences? Nope. Subsequent tinkering expanded suffrage slightly but again, the results were the same. Then last century they did several things in quick succession (often portrayed as "universal suffrage" but as we'll see that's just what people always call any expansion, the "universe" of one's imagination grows). First they gave all men (including poor men), and older women suffrage. This made no appreciable difference except that, having now entertained the idea that women should vote (it wasn't technically illegal before Great Reform it just didn't happen enough to matter) the women realised hey, maybe women should be politicians and that did cause some modest changes. Then they equalised voting age for men and women, so now a 21 year old can vote regardless of gender.
Later in that century the UK gave almost† all 18 year olds the vote too, and again the worry was maybe a 19 year old will vote differently? Nope. More or less the same results.
So, maybe giving corporations the vote changes nothing, but I'm less hopeful than I was for giving Sarah, an 18 year living with her parents on benefits the vote knowing that for some insane reason she's not actually much more likely to vote against a "Fuck Sarah, take her money away" policy than everybody else is because apparently all people are morons so giving more of them suffrage changed nothing. I think corporations are psychopaths not morons...
† Although most crooks in the UK aren't magically stopped from voting, they can't vote in prison and in practice it's very hard to vote from prison even if it would be legal for you because you're held there prior to a trial or whatever. So that's not ideal. It is controversial whether specific electoral interference crimes should result in withdrawal of suffrage, as is the practice today or whether that's just petty and ultimately futile.
[[ I still support universal suffrage, but because now it's everybody's fault. You're not going to get a good government, but now the terrible government is your fault too. ]]
I said, and factually, that voting power is held by corporations within those states, just like within this town in Delaware. Nothing to do with what you wrote about semantics of the state’s own incorporation reality or fiction
What? The principle is "one person, one vote". I'd like to cite the principle of "one person, one vote, unless they're named recursivecaveat in which case 1 trillion votes" to assert my rights in the Fenwick island elections please.