Anytime someone claims to be a capitalist and then starts talking about how labeling laws are unnecessary and wrong really pisses me off. The whole theory is based on infinitesimal buyers and sellers each maximizing their own profit levels through mutually beneficial exchanges based on perfect information.
Take away any one of those things, and you don’t have a capitalist system any more. It might be workable, it might even be better, but let’s at least acknowledge that it is capitalism. Please. If you are allowing the sellers to hide information, it might be called corporatism. If you are allowing the buyers to hide information, it might be called … I dunno. Legally empowering the buyer side has never been done, so it has no -ism name.
Furthermore, I’d like to point out that the whole notion of limited liability is not very capitalist at all. If you are a part of a venture, and giving money, then you are responsible for what that venture does. Limited liability allows people to separate their money and ethics, by making investment in a gray-area company a less risky proposition. Adam Smith spoke out against separating liability, ownership, and control, but now that’s the standard practice. Enron was owned by stockholders, controlled by a board, and run by the CEO, who is going to go to jail.
Furthermore, limited liability gives more powers to the sellers, and so when they instituted LLCs, they also instituted bankruptcy law. Unfortunately, bankruptcy protection is in the process of being gutted. Where are the people trying to eliminate limited liability? That oh-so-anti-capitalist scheme?
Nowhere. Because rich people take part in LLCs but don’t go bankrupt.
The rules aren’t supposed to be for sale. If they are, then fascism is what quickly emerges, as all of a sudden we are all forced to be a part of the Estado Corporativo. A highly profitable enterprise in the short and medium term, but ultimately destined to fail as people begin to realize the yoke they are under.
