Corporations

The current American Economic System is based on corporations. The first step in studying corporations is to ask the question: What is a corporation? The common claim that corporations are people is obviously ridiculous and does not merit any serious consideration.

Corporations are creations of the government. Without the government, corporations do not exist. The powers that corporations, the owners of corporations, and the leadership of corporations have are granted, not by God, but by the government. When the government grants excessive powers to corporations, those excessive powers are interference in the marketplace by the government.

Corporate Consolidation

The consolidation of large corporations through either mergers or acquisitions should not be permitted. Large corporations should not be allowed to purchase stock in other corporations except in special cases such as mutual funds or retirement funds that benefit broad sections of society, not just the wealthy. Mutual funds provide a service to people who are investing.

The size of corporations in a well designed free market economic system should be determined by only three things:

Willingness of customers to purchase from the corporation.
Willingness of suppliers to sell to the corporation
Willingness of employees to work for the corporation.

Audits

In 2024, billionaire Elon Musk through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) engaged in an audit of the federal government. We must return the favor to Musk and his fellow billionaires by conducting audits of billionaires and large corporations to determine how much of their wealth is due to parasitic behavior.

Truth Social Audit

As an audit on a corporations consider the previous discussion on Truth Social illustrates the auditing process described above. Trump controls and makes personal use of Truth Social and received great wealth and significant benefit from the money of investors. Trump does not provide a commensurate level of productive behavior that benefits society. Trump is engaging in parasitic behavior.

What Trump could have done if he wanted to be responsible and productive, was make Truth Social a non-profit institution. The non-profit Truth Social would use the same open source software Mastodon. Donations would fund the servers. Volunteers would run the servers. This is a very feasible and proven scenario used by other groups that employ the Mastodon software.

If Truth Social was nonprofit the investors could invest in other corporations than Truth Social that engage in productive behavior. This would be an economic benefit to society. Instead we now have a parasite enriching himself from his foolish investors.

In this particular case of Truth Social, there is probably little that can be done to prevent the parasitic behavior. In a free market, people people can invest in Truth Social, whether it is a good or bad investment. Many of the Truth Social investors are likely strongly motivated by political fervor and will follow their beliefs.

Corporations sometimes serve as vehicles for legal scamming or even illegal operations. Truth Social is but one example. This is parasitic activity that degrades the performance of the economic system, and not just for the people that initially lose their money. The money acquired by the parasites should be used instead for productive investments.

What can be done?. One aspect of this problem is that Corporations provide secrecy. In general:

Immoral or criminal activities require secrecy.

Transparency is needed to reduce criminal or immoral activities by and through corporations.