Stop mixing up corporations and humans

Our laws and moral systems often fail to differentiate between humans and corporations.

Corporations are legal persons and as such they have rights like owning things, trading with goods and services, entering into contract with others or introducing a law suit against them.

The UDHR (art. 17) says that “everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others”. And everybody is equal before the law, right? This idea is one of the unwritten bases of liberal capitalism. But it is wrong. Because it adds “as well as in association with others”. Every human has the right, but not every association. The UDHR mixes up humans and corporations.

Another example is Fratelli Tutti.

Corporations are not humans. They are just ideas, born out of human minds, registered in some public database, personified as legal persons. They are part of the spiritual world.

We can consider corporations as spirits. A spirit is an idea that exists outside of a human brain.

Unlike humans, corporations can be incredibly powerful and are virtually immortal. They survive the lifetime of individual humans.

Learning to make the difference is important because some of the egoistic instututions we created (I call them greedy giants) are out of control and “want” to rule the world. If we want to avoid a catastrophe, we need to act without mercy. Every human deserves mercy, but no corporation does.