Grocer, 1944. This guy wouldn't be working for himself, in this occupation, anymore.

Mandy Burton from her article in the Casper Star Tribune, quoting from the late Charles Schultz's cartoon, Peanuts.



Pretty observant article, but not true so much anymore. Today, Schultz's characters would have to say:

“I think that the purpose of going to school is to get good grades so then you can go on to high school, and the purpose is to study hard so you can get good grades so you can go to college, and the purpose of going to college is so you can get good grades so you can go on to graduate school, and the purpose of that is to work hard and get good grades so we can get a job and be successful move to a city you are not from and have no connections to so that we can get married and have kids, divorce and abandon them, so we can send them to grammar school to get good grades, so they can go to high school to get good grades so they can go to college and work hard and move on to where they have no connections…” Grim view, I know. But a realistic one in the modern American economy.



I've posted a lot on this blog about the disappearance of various small businesses. I haven't posted as much on those that have persevered so far, as its always easier to ignore that, although I do have one in the hopper on bars. Mandy Burton from her article in the, quoting from the late Charles Schultz's cartoon,Pretty observant article, but not true so much anymore. Today, Schultz's characters would have to say:Grim view, I know. But a realistic one in the modern American economy.I've posted a lot on this blog about the disappearance of various small businesses. I haven't posted as much on those that have persevered so far, as its always easier to ignore that, although I do have one in the hopper on bars.

As part of what we're observing here this week in regards to Labor Day and the American celebration of labor, we might want to take a look at the conglomeration of absolutely everything. Indeed, to my way of thinking, it's one of the worst things that's happened to the United States, and indeed the world, in the past century.

Americans are fond of thinking that they live in a free market, but they really do not. A free market, in a pure sense, is a market in which every individual competes on a level playing field. But that sort of market, to be truly free, would exist in the absence of corporate entities. Ours clearly does not. Indeed, it emphasizes them.

Now, the reason that matters is that corporations, in a state of nature so to speak, would be partnerships, which are assemblies of individuals who are still individuals. Partnerships, if they are conventional partnerships, exist in a much different legal environment than corporations do. Corporations may be assemblies of people, and of course are as people are behind all entities and things at the end of the day, but corporations are creatures of the state, created by the recognition of whichever state entity they are formed subject to, and recognized at law as a "person".*

That last thing is a profound legal concept. Walmart, General Motors, or British Petroleum, for example, are all people in the eyes of the law. You know that they aren't, but at law they are. That means that under the law nearly everywhere they are legally liable as people for their torts, as compared to conventional partnerships in which every partner can be held individually liable for the acts of the partnership. If that was the law in regards to shareholders and the liability of corporations, there's no way that they'd have grown so large and so predominant.

Additionally, in the United States, thanks to a ruling by the United States Supreme Court, corporations have the same right of speech that individuals do. That's an almost shocking proposition, but it's the law. It's hard to believe, for example, that every shareholder of Amalgamated Amalgamated holds the same view as the board of directors, but that board can decide what the corporation thinks and how it spends its money on getting its message across. That's the corporations speech, even if Mrs. Anon Jones in Passedonby, Florida, who is a shareholder, disagrees.

Corporations have been around for a long, long time and there's legitimate reasons to be sure for big and small ones. The oldest one is debated as to that status. Some claim the Dutch East India Company, which disappeared in 1799, was the first one, but that status is certainly challenged.





Logo of the Dutch East India Company.





Some claim that status for the Hudson's Bay Company, which has the advantage over the Dutch East India Company in that it is still around with popular stores in Canada now commonly nicknamed "The Bay".





The flag of the Hudson's Bay Company.





While the Hudson's Bay Company hasn't folded in, like the Dutch East India Company, it isn't what it once was, sadly. None the less the company that could and should claim that it made it to the what would be come the American Pacific Coast well in advance of Lewis and Clark was formed on May 2, 1670, a long while back.**



Both of those corporations are sorts of exceptions to the early rule, which is interesting in that they were both retail and manufacturing, with HBC being particularly that way. The manufacturing aspect of them is what caused the need for their corporate status to exist. A giant financial enterprise on that scale simply couldn't exist as a partnership, and we won't pretend otherwise. Corporations are not only the backbone to the Corporate Capitalist system we actually have, but a necessary element of it. The question explored here is a bit different than that.





Before we move on, determining the oldest corporation in the United States would be a little more difficult, although I'm sure it could be done. There are some really old ones to be sure, with some old businesses that were not incorporated (at least originally) dating back to the 17th Century. The oldest corporation, oddly enough, appears to be a perfume company, still in existence, but it's hard to tell that for sure.



