all that 'empire' stuff form last year

The Boston Athenaeum has archived lecture series online and I noticed the author of a book I had seen a while ago, Cullen Murphy on his book Are We Rome?. What a better way to get the thrust of the book without having to wait until I wade through the seven other books I'm currently trying to read?

The author had a lot to say and a fascinating body of knowledge to draw from, and convinced me that the book is worth reading if just for that - a lot of interesting things about Roman cultural identity and the histories they looked back on to form it, details of society that we don't see, etc.

Comparing of the United States and Rome he highlighted a lot of parallels and gave meaningful background to them. Then he started down the road of "we are Rome and will fall like her because the government is too weak" and how we can learn from Rome how to make sure the government can 'work in concert' when it needs to, has enough power, ie is centralized, well-funded, etc... never addressing the obvious contradiction between demanding exhaustive governmental authority and criticizing an apathetic citizenry, and never addressing the danger of corruption in our own government despite mentioning some ripe parallels in the Roman system.

For 30 some years, the current generation has been beating this same drum, concurrently demanding ever-expanding governmental authority and complaining of abusive leadership, never admitting that the two go hand-in-hand. It seems that those that are running our world would sooner hand society over wholesale to bureaucrats, politicians, and the would-be emperors they harbor than concede that their may be some tiny flaw in their government-panacea ideology. If we are talking about emperors, this sounds like new clothes to me.

I was also surprised that he didn't explore the possibility that Rome began to fall as soon as the Republic was compromised, that the gains of the Empire were like the flight of a rocket whose engine has given out - the crash destroys it, but is not the true cause of the destruction. He didn't broach the subject of an American parallel to this might be the greatest danger of all; that the abdication of authority and responsibility to a centralized power, be it emperor or bureaucracy, creates a system ripe for the picking by any megalomaniac. That may be the true lesson from the fall of Rome; maybe we can avoid that fate.

thoughts on the corporate problem: revoking coprorate charters

"It has no body to kick and no soul to damn."^[citation]

Lord Edward Thurlow, re: the corporation

Thinking back to my intro business classes, I remember learning that corporations operate under some kind of license from the people; the privileges of incorporation granted on the condition that the corporation act vaguely in the public interest (there are many permutations of corporations but I am referring to the common, public, Mircosoft/Enron type). How can that be quantified? The answer was to maximize shareholder value, which means doing anything that is legal (or, implicitly, will not incur legal costs greater than the revenue it generates) to deliver value to shareholders. It seems ideal, the corporation has a clear-cut mandate and the free shareholders make decisions on how to regulate the company through the democratic process and on how to morally distribute the proceeds of corporate activity.

We all know it doesn't work as well as it should. We have also been convinced that corporations can do whatever they want, and we can't stop them any more than we can issue commands to our neighbors.

But corporations are not our neighbors, they are not "natural persons". They come into being through a charter representing our collective blessing. Should we not be able to revoke that charter at our will?

The cost of corporate dissolution, and possibly the risk of assigning personal liability to the governing board & executives of corporations, would be enough to enable the inherent morality of these "natural persons" to overwhelm the psychopathy of the corporate entity. The stain of being kicked out of even one state would be enough; this could be a 'big stick' for the soft-spoken people of America, and may even be adopted internationally.

The format would be chosen by each state with the goal being a pure referendum, each vote counting.

this is a simplification of our system, a step toward a more raw democracy, where everyone's thoughts are counted, where injustice can't hide in pretensions of subtlety, and would serve to educate the public on corporate structure and behavior.

This would also empower states and highlight the ability of a federal system to act as a political incubator.

anyway I could probably bloviate on this issue for pages, but this is a blog so I'll stop now...