The Law of Corporate Necessity

Corporations, like unicorns, are imaginary beasts, but unlike unicorns, they are usually far from benign. Corporations exist only under the law--there is no place you can go to "see" a corporation--and yet they are as real as any creature in the forest. Corporations are the creations of modern plunderers and pillagers to protect themselves against other plunderers and pillagers, and against legal repercussions arising from their actions.

Corporations however, are necessary to a stable and free society. Without corporations, freedom cannot long endure, because corporations provide outlets--safety valves--for the tyrants, despots, and revolutionaries among us--the aggressive types who need, more than anything, to be in charge. Che Guevarra, for lack of a corporation, became a revolutionary. In other circumstances he would have probably made a successful CEO. Without Microsoft, Bill Gates (ludicrous though it may sound) might very well be up in the mountains somewhere, leading a band of guerrillas trying to overthrow some government.

Communist societies replace hundreds of corporations with a single party, but aren't the rules for survival and advancement in the party strikingly similar to the rules for climbing the corporate hierarchy? Corporations, despised by the communists, are as near to the communist ideal as are most communist countries. They are both dictatorships that profess concern for the workers, while urging the workers to place the welfare of the organization above their own, and reluctantly granting those workers as little real authority in the organization as possible. They both use slogans and mission statements and propaganda to motivate the workers and paint rosy pictures of life inside their organizations.

Corporations are stable--and necessary--islands of dictatorship in the chaotic but democratic seas of free societies. They provide fulfillment for those who lust after power, and, at the same time, they give sanctuary to those souls Eric Hoffer defined as true believers--people who need to believe, who need to belong, who need to dedicate themselves to a cause or an organization--people who willingly devote thirty or forty years to laboring in the corporate fields, and shed sad tears when they have to retire because they can no longer imagine a life outside the corporation.