Private Companies Beyond Government Eyes

“Ludwig had not taken over a public corporation before, preferring to create private companies entirely owned and controlled by himself and unregulated by the government. But, by investing a few million dollars to buy control of AHSS, he could recoup his outlay almost immediately by selling off the company’s ships, acquiring the port¬ folio of stocks, and pressing the government for settlement of the war claims.”

“All of this, and luck, adds up to a man who is going to be successful and innovative. It does not, however, give us the person who for years held the title “richest man on earth.” For that, we need one more ingredient, which we can call “the corporate exponent.” What this means is that Ludwig, along with a number of other nineteenth- and twentieth-century entrepreneurs, has been able to multiply his individual abilities exponentially by adroit use of the corporation as a legal, political, and financial device. In jurisprudence, a corporation is considered a person. It is not. It is a machine, and, like other machines, it is constructed to do a job. The job of a corporate machine is to make money, and its success is measured in terms of how efficiently it does so. Being a machine, a corporation has no value system, no conscience. It neither knows nor cares whether — or what — it creates or destroys. Decisions about how it is to be used are left to its human owners.”