That's a totally fair point, although I'm totally citing this if someone ever asks why I destroy narrative flow with asterisks and extraneous paragraphs. Limiting corporate power is not something I'm particuarly worried about, but I can understand why other people do, and I can see circumstances where I would.
My first worry is that limiting power through bureaucracy will back fire: there's a pretty big correlation between a corporation being worryingly powerful and having good lawyers to manipulate laws to their advantages,* so the burden will fall disproportionately on the smaller companies, hindering their ability to limit the bigger companies through competition.
If we decide that benefit outweighs that cost, there might be other ways ease the burden of moving into being an official business, like exempting the first N thousand dollars from taxes. I don't know enough about corporate tax to know if there's a reasonable way to do this without letting Microsoft make 400 billion tiny corporations. Or let people form sole proprietorships and incentivize reporting income through the negative income tax I want so much.
*My favorite example: remember the lead toy scare from a couple of years ago? Congress passed a law mandating independent testing for all toys. This was an expensive burden on a lot of small toy companies. But Mattel, the company that imported the leaded toys in the first place, bought an exception for themselves allowing them to use their own labs.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2011-01-10 12:25 am (UTC)My first worry is that limiting power through bureaucracy will back fire: there's a pretty big correlation between a corporation being worryingly powerful and having good lawyers to manipulate laws to their advantages,* so the burden will fall disproportionately on the smaller companies, hindering their ability to limit the bigger companies through competition.
If we decide that benefit outweighs that cost, there might be other ways ease the burden of moving into being an official business, like exempting the first N thousand dollars from taxes. I don't know enough about corporate tax to know if there's a reasonable way to do this without letting Microsoft make 400 billion tiny corporations. Or let people form sole proprietorships and incentivize reporting income through the negative income tax I want so much.
*My favorite example: remember the lead toy scare from a couple of years ago? Congress passed a law mandating independent testing for all toys. This was an expensive burden on a lot of small toy companies. But Mattel, the company that imported the leaded toys in the first place, bought an exception for themselves allowing them to use their own labs.