I'm willing to be convinced different, but I think it would be better if companies had to be owned by a person or people ie that companies can't own companies.
It seems a layer of indirection that is more harmful than useful.
As somebody who really appreciates being able to own a ton of different companies in small amounts in my retirement account, I'm not sure if this is the right way to solve the problem.
Requiring full disclosure of all ownership stakes, traceable back to individuals, is probably a better route for this.
And it seems that there's a trend towards that, last company I registered had a new process for listing beneficial ownership of all significant amounts. Just need to push that legislation further.
You can do this but you should also relinquish all voting rights of said companies. When companies like Blackrock, State Street, Fidelity, Vanguard, etc all sit on the same boards, you're going to get decisions being forced that may not be good for the company, workers, customers, or country. Doubly so when they're sitting on two competing companies boards.
You can allow mutual funds or ETFs or whatever similar instrument, but they should not be allowed to have a vote or say in the company.
You could either make an exception for funds, or simply make them owned directly. Probably impossible before computerisation but fairly straightforward now.
The difficult problem is how you distinguish a fund for consumers versus the types of funds you want to disallow. Start trying to codify that in law and it will quickly bring people finding the edges for their own purposes.
Full public disclosure of all beneficial ownership in entities would go a lot further, IMHO.
banning corporate ownership of other companies would dramatically decrease the value of companies that people own. it would be much more difficult to sell your company. you might have built a successful company over the course of your life, and your children don't want to run it. Other companies in the same business but perhaps not in the same regious are good candidates to buy it. There are far fewer individuals with the assets to purchase a successful company.
should other companies wish to buy your company, they could still buy all the assets of your company, but not the company itself.
Also super unlikely, and only worth discussing except as a theoretical exercise. We just aren't undoing centuries of law. Same reason trusts are here to stay.
It's inefficient in the case of a wholly-owned subsidiary to require company A's shareholders to hire lawyers, setup bank accounts, books, etc. for a separate company B which ultimately provides the same limited liability vis-a-vis third parties. Joint-ventures become tricky between corporations. Corporations can't hold potentially toxic assets. There are quite a few good ones. Interesting nonetheless.
Also as with all corporate law questions, <other jurisdiction> allows it, so we'll just go there instead.
I'm not sure I understand your first point. If a company can't own another company there's no such thing as a "wholly-owned subsidiary". If you buy a company they become the same company.
If I am running a business in the US and I want to set up shop in Canada or France, I have to register a second business in that country and have my US headquarters own it. What I want is for ownership of the foreign subsidiary to directly mirror the primary company's, and the most efficient way to do it is to just have the US company own the foreign one.
If companies can't own companies, then instead I have to directly transfer ownership over the subsidiary to the shareholders of the primary company. That means they can sell their shares of the foreign subsidiary independently of the headquarters, and the two companies' ownership will diverge over time. I am effectively forced to IPO the foreign subsidiary at the moment of their creation.
You can't assign ownership to the current CEO or board members, because that creates a conflict of interest. They'd be able to take a US company they manage and turn it into a foreign subsidiary they own.
This would also make joint ventures, mergers, and acquisitions far more difficult and complicated, if not impossible.
> We limit liability for risky ventures for a reason.
Because the investor class had the political powers to get that protection written into law for themselves, so as to externalize risks while privatizing rewards.
The alternative has been the government controlling which ventures are funded, at which point the government assumes the risk.
Would you rather the only entity with a monopoly on violence be liable for all risky ventures? What happens when the government has a very different ideology and goals than what you support?
Again, there is a reason the status quo of private capital doing risky business with limited liability tends to work better.
The government interferes here for good reason, as no one would start a business if they would be personally responsible for random things. The LL in LLC is Limited Liability. Most governments want to make it easy to start a business.
This is the status quo because it has been consistently better than the government doing everything and being liable for everything. With private companies, you have various branches of the government with some ability to correct or regulate matters when a private entity is liable or responsible for something.
In the alternative scenario, when something goes wrong and the government is liable, good luck getting the government to find itself liable.
> The alternative has been the government controlling which ventures are funded, at which point the government assumes the risk.
No, that's not even remotely true; private investment in business ventures with risk long predates limited liability being attached to the corporate form. (In fact, it was the success the capitalist class achieved without that protection that enabled them to acquire the political power to get limited liability attached to the corporate form.)
It's only a risk for anyone loaning to the company, and they're choosing to make those loans despite the risk.
Having an LLC doesn't get you much special protection. You could make equivalent contracts with some assets securing the loan and other assets not securing the loan. The main purpose of the LLC framework is to standardize the whole thing.
> It's only a risk for anyone loaning to the company
No, voluntary lending is not the only way that corporations acquire liabilities, either now or at the time of limited liability was attached to the form. For instance, tort liability is a thing.
"The defendant and the victim in this matter had been friends but had a falling out which resulted in an incident on the October 27, 2024 whereby abusive and homophobic text messages were sent to the victim causing her alarm and distress."
Yes, the prosecutor defined the "victim" in this case as the third party receiving the text messages. They were so harmed by hearing someone who beat the defendant until she had a brain injury called a slur that the only remedy was bust into her house with a swat team to put her in a jail cell, instead of having the "victim" block and cut ties with the sender.
I didn't misrepresent the situation it all. It is exactly as I described.
11 armed people is a functional equivalent of a SWAT team. My statement was hyperbolic. If you serve someone a court summons for a bullshit charge it is a threat of violence against their person. And the charge was bullshit. And the threat of violence was followed up with force.
I'm not lying. I'm also not Christian at all! Never claimed to be.
Sorry, mixed you up with someone else in this thread.
I don't believe that 11 armed people turned up to arrest her. I've never heard of such a thing.
Edit: ok, I'm going to assume you had no idea that UK police officers are not routinely armed. Armed officers are specifically trained and only deployed when the suspect is thought to be armed. Most of those were probably IT to check computers and devices.
She pled guilty to the charge on the advice of her lawyer.
Edit 2: actually the more I read on this the less I believe. An initial contact by the police would be 2 police officers, they would knock at the door and ask to speak to you. How did they get a warrant to get in? Is this all completely bullshit?
I don't think that's true. Perhaps in your dialect of English, but if I was down the pub and someone started with, "Did I ever tell you the story of when I...", I certainly wouldn't assume it was fictional.
I think "tell you the story of" has a different connotation from "storytelling"!
E.g. if you said someone was good at "storytelling" as a skill, then I would expect it to be most likely fictional. I agree that "tell you the story of..." could easily be nonfictional.
We still talk about "bugs" (99+% of computer defects in the past 70+ years have not been caused by insects) and "AJAX" (long after most of these requests use JSON instead of XML).
Some of us can! I certainly enjoy doing it, and according to "man 5 acl" what you assert is completely false. Unless you have a particular commit or document from kernel.org you had in mind?
See 6.2.1 of RFC8881, where NFSv4 ACLs are described. They are quite similar to Windows ACLs.
Here is kernel dev telling they are against adding NFSv4 ACL implementation. The relevant RichAcls patch never got merged: https://lkml.org/lkml/2016/3/15/52
I see what I misunderstood, even in the presence of an ALLOW entry, a DENY entry would prohibit access. I am familiar with that on the Windows side but haven't really dug into Linux ACLs. The ACCESS CHECK ALGORITHM[1] section of the acl(5) man page was pretty clear, I think.
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