Quotulatiousness

September 4, 2013

Corporations are (legally) people

Filed under: Business, History, Law, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 16:26

At Not Quite Noahpinion, Josiah Neeley explains why the legal notion of corporate personhood was actually intended as consumer protection:

Contrary to popular impression, corporate personhood did not start with Citizens United. In fact, corporate personhood dates back to the old English common law, where it was originally conceived as a consumer protection measure.

Suppose I buy meat from a butcher and it makes me sick. I might wish to sue the butcher for damages. But suppose that I bought the meat not from an individual butcher but from Acme Meat, Inc. It was a central doctrine of the common law that only persons could sue or be sued, own property, or make legally binding contracts. So if a corporation is not a person, I am out of luck. The response to this was to treat corporations as legal persons, who could sue or be sued, make and enforce contracts, buy, sell, and hold property, and so on.

Of course, courts could have granted corporations all the same rights, abilities and duties without calling them persons. But this would have been merely a semantic difference. Once a society decides to have corporations, it has to grant them something along the lines of legal personhood if for no other reason than to protect those who deal with it.

Likewise, once a society decides to grant corporations the right to own property, it is absurd to deny them constitutional protections. The New York Times, the AFL-CIO, and the Sierra Club are all corporations. But it would be ridiculous if the government tried to use those organizations’ corporate status as a justification for regulating the editorial position of the New York Times, or controlling the advocacy position of the Sierra Club or the AFL-CIO.

[…]

More than 150 years ago Alexis de Tocqueville noted in his Democracy in America that the genius of the American political tradition lay in what he called associations but what in today’s terminology we would call corporations. In Europe, to advance some political, social, or economic cause required some wealthy patron. In America, by contrary, groups of people who individually might not have had deep pockets could come together and pool their resources by founding an organization to advance the cause.

Far from being a tool of repression, corporations advanced the interests of democracy and equality by allowing the little guy to organize to accomplish what otherwise could only be achieved by the very rich. Ending corporate personhood would not stop billionaire individuals like the Koch brothers or George Soros from using their wealth to affect the political process, but it would hamper small grass roots organizations which choose to use the corporate form. Ultimately, the long tradition of corporate personhood represents not a threat to democracy, but a support of it.

Air-Sea Battle as a response to Chinese military expansion

Filed under: China, Military, Pacific, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:18

The Diplomat‘s Amitai Etzioni looks at the US Air-Sea Battle plan:

On the face of it, the Pentagon’s Air-Sea Battle plan makes eminently good sense; it is a clear response to a clear challenge. China has been developing a whole slew of weapons (especially anti-ship missiles) over the past two decades that are of great concern to the U.S. military. These weapons, known in Pentagon-speak as anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) capabilities, could undermine the international right to free passage in China’s surrounding waters or, in the case of a conflict over Taiwan or contested islands in the South and East China Seas, prevent the U.S. from making good on defense commitments to its friends in the region.

In response, the Pentagon developed Air-Sea Battle (ASB), the employment of which entails, according to position papers developed to promote it, a blistering assault on China’s mainland. A report by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) gives a detailed account of how an ASB-style war with China would unfold. In the opening “blinding campaign,” the U.S. attacks China’s reconnaissance and command-and-control networks to degrade the PLA’s ability to target U.S. and allied forces. Next, the military takes the fight to the Chinese mainland, striking long-range anti-ship missile launchers. Given that this is where the anti-ship missiles are located, it is only logical that the U.S. would target land-based platforms. And to go after them, one of course needs to take out China’s air defense systems, command control centers, and other anti-access weapons. In short, ASB requires a total war with China.

[…]

The main flaw Air-Sea Battle it is not merely that it is a particularly aggressive military response to the anti-access/area-denial challenge. The problem is that ASB is developing in a foreign policy vacuum. If the U.S. were to conduct a thorough review of China’s military capabilities and its regional and global ambitions — and found that the Chinese were planning to forcefully expand their territory or unseat the U.S. as the global power, perhaps Air-Sea Battle might be deemed appropriate.

“Despite a rash of deadly train crashes…”

Filed under: Media, Railways — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:15

Coyote Blog indulges in a good old-time fisking of an article built on the claim that there has been a “trend” of increasingly deadly railway accidents:

The best way to explain the phenomenon is with an example, and the Arizona Republic presented me with a great one today, in the form of an article by Joan Lowy of the Associated Press. This in an article that reads more like an editorial than a news story. It is about the Federal requirement for railroads to put safety electronics called Positive Train Control (PTC) on trains by a certain date. The author has a pretty clear narrative that this is an absolutely critical piece of equipment for the public good, and that railroads are using scheming and lobbying to unfairly delay and dilute this critical mandate (seriously, I am not exaggerating the tone, you can read it for yourself.)

My point, however, is not to challenge the basic premise of the article, but to address this statement in her opening paragraph (emphasis added).

    Despite a rash of deadly train crashes, the railroad industry’s allies in Congress are trying to push back the deadline for installing technology to prevent the most catastrophic types of collisions until at least 2020, half a century after accident investigators first called for such safety measures.

The reporter is claiming a “rash of deadly train crashes” — in other words, she is saying, or at least implying, that there is an upward trend in deadly train crashes. So let’s ask ourselves if this claimed trend actually exists. She says it so baldly, right there in the first seven words, that surely it must be true, right?

[…]

So let’s go to the data. It is actually very easy to find, and I would be surprised if Ms. Lowy did not actually have this data in her hands. It is at the Federal Railway Administration Office of Safety Analysis. 2013 data is only current through June and seems to be set up on an October -September fiscal year. So I ran the data only for October-June of every year to make sure the results were comparable to 2013. Each year in the data below is actually 9 months of data.

By the way, when one is looking at railroad fatalities, one needs to understand that railroads do kill a lot of people every year, but the vast, vast majority of these — 99% or more — are killed at grade crossings. People still do not understand that a freight train takes miles to stop. (see postscript below, but as an aside, I would be willing to make a bet: Since deaths at grade crossings outnumber deaths from collisions by about 100:1, I would be willing to bet any amount of money that I could take the capital the author wants railroads to invest in PTC and save far more lives by investing it in grade crossing protection. People like Ms. Lowy who advocate for these regulations never, ever seem to consider prioritization and tradeoffs.)

Anyway, looking at the data, here is the data for people killed each year in US railroad accidents (as usual click to enlarge any of the charts):

Train accident deaths Oct-Jun

So, rather than a “rash”, we have just the opposite — the lowest number of deaths in a decade. One. I will admit that technically she said rash of “fatal accidents” and this is data on fatalities, but I’m going to make a reasonable assumption that one death means one fatal accident — which certainly cannot be higher than the number of fatal accidents in previous years and is likely lower.

Most of you will agree that this makes the author’s opening statement a joke. Believe it or not — and this happens a surprising number of times — this journalist is claiming a trend that not only does not exist, but is of the opposite sign.

More on Britain’s aircraft carrier program

Filed under: Britain, Military — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:02

The always informative Sir Humphrey responds to yesterday’s Daily Mail and other media reports on the CVF program:

The first thing that struck the author on reading it was that it highlighted the challenges posed in bringing any large piece of equipment into service. There was a lot of comments about the risk posed to the UK by not having the so-called ‘Crowsnest’ AEW capability in service until 2022 which left the platform at risk. It is very easy to focus on the idea that a carrier is late, and that is a relatively simple piece of kit, so why should it take so long to bring into service? In reality the introduction into service of CVF is a watershed moment for the Royal Navy — it will represent a step change in capability, and merge together several very different capabilities which the RN has either not operated for a while, or which it has not operated at all. At its heart the RN is having to simultaneously introduce a brand new class of ship into service, with all the technical risk that this entails. This is then backed up by the near simultaneous introduction into service of the most technically advanced jet the UK has ever operated, and also bring the UK back into the world of fixed wing carrier operations, a skill which even with the mitigation measures in place will still be a challenge to regain. Its also about bringing a new AEW platform into service, after a near 6 year gap in cover, and again with all the very considerable technical risk posed by this. Finally its about bringing the whole package together and working with the rest of the RN to ensure that what exists isn’t just a collection of equipment of very levels of operational utility and capability, but is in fact a fully worked up and integrated system which has an effect far beyond the sum of its parts.

[…]

One thing that reads through very clearly in the evidence is the clear emphasis that CVF is seen as a joint asset for Coalition operations. While obviously it provides a national capability in extremis, it is clear that provision of a CVF hull and airwing is seen as a major means of the UK working with coalition partners. This is an important part of the reality of future naval operations — while we like to fondly imagine that CVF provides the UK with the ability to work in isolation, in reality its an asset that will provide great influence in coalition work. The evidence is clear that in future the UK sees provision of CVF on operations as being part of a wider multi-national force, and particularly early in its life, there is an expectation that capability gaps such as AEW would be met either by working with partner nations, or by wider UK assets (e.g. AEW Sentry).

This is important as it highlights the gradual shift in UK thinking away from funding the provision of an entire wholesale package of capabilities into assuming that risks can be taken in some areas. When one reads the evidence though, it is suddenly clear how far fetched the scenarios sound — for instance it was only under heavy questioning, when the line of assumptions reached ‘fighting an enemy with French and US cover in high seas away from landbased cover’ did we discover that the RN may struggle a wee bit without CROWSNEST. One would hope that between 2020 and 2022 the RN is not going to be re-enacting scenes from a Tom Clancy novel?

QotD: Quebec and religious minorities

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

As this blog has pointing out for many years now, too many for these tired old eyes, at its core Quebec nationalism is an ethnic nationalism. By their nature ethnic nationalists are bigots. Certainly the sort of bigotry that emanates from the pure laine wing of the PQ is fairly tame. This is Canada and even our fanatics have a dullness about them. Still bigotry is bigotry. Tyranny is tyranny. Telling people what they can wear in the workplace, regardless of any objective public health and safety concerns, is tyranny. A private employer may discriminate at his leisure. The government cannot. It must represent all its people.

Our tax dollars, for Quebec is the great mendicant of modern Canada, are financing a policy of religious bigotry. Some conservatives might welcome this decision as it seems, on the face of it, to be going after the burqa. The ban, however, is on all religious headware. At the moment it applies only to the public sector, which is vast in Quebec, but knowing the statist inclinations of the PQ it will soon apply to the private sector as well.

To borrow from Churchill, this is worse than a crime, it’s a mistake.

Quebec is not an appealing place for ethnic and religious minorities. It’s why so many flee to Ontario when they receive their citizenship papers. Expect a second Exodus from La Belle Province should this Charter of Quebec Values come into force. Just as talented Anglos were driven from Montreal and the Eastern Townships in the 1970s, we’ll soon have waves of Sikhs arriving in Toronto. I will be delighted to greet them. There is a large community here in the Imperial Capital and they are peaceful and productive. If Quebec wants to put their bigotry ahead of economic common sense, let them. Then let us cut the equalization life line that has propped up these statist and bigoted policies for over forty years. First they discriminated against the English. Then the Jews. Now the time comes for all the others who are not of the blood.

Richard Anderson, “Quebec Values”, The Gods of the Copybook Headings, 2013-09-02

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