The implication being that without such laws, enslavement of children, poisoning and maiming of workers, and other horrors would be totally legal in America?
Perhaps the real problem is the mess that occurs when governments recognize and try to control abstractions like corporations to protect people from liability.
Well, yes, without the laws that banned those things, they would be totally legal. That's what “law” means.
> Perhaps the real problem is the mess that occurs when governments recognize and try to control abstractions like corporations to protect people from liability.
Liability is as much a creation of government as corporations are.
100% incorrect
In fact corporations are a government created constructed with the expressed purpose of Limiting liability of the shareholders (owners) for what the corporation does in an effort to increase investment capital. People would be less likely to invest freely if they were personally liable.
Business Structures like corporations are like most other government regulations in that they LIMIT not create liability. From the EPA, to OHSA they all taken over the liability and they alone are the arbitrators of "acceptable" and individuals actual damages do not matter
All legal concepts are government created fictions. That includes everything from corporations to parking tickets. Why do you think corporations are government created concept but liability isnt?
Reductionism can be useful for argument but can also go too far and lose the point.
Wrongness (subjectively, at least; let's avoid the question of objective morality) exists independent of government, and independent of liability.
But liability is a creation of government through law, just as much as limitations on liability are. Which is why government has the power to limit liability; if liability was independent of government, government would also not be able to limit it.
Why would government create something then proceed to limit the very thing they created, that make no sense
It is limited liability because liability existed before the government, then the government came in to limit it
No,the premise is wrong. Government existed, and created liability, before government also created liability, so when government created limited liability, liability did exist to limit, even though that existence was not independent of government.
> It is limited liability because liability existed before the government
No, it 's called limited liability because liability existed before the limitation, not because liability existed before government.
Just like the FISA limits on government surveillance are called limits on government surveillance because government surveillance existed before FISA, but not because government surveillance existed before government.
Except, liability implements that innate sense of "wrongness" you and the other poster referred to, while limits on liability violate it. So in that sense one is justice (however flawed or approximate it may be in implementation) and one is injustice.
But my statement was even simpler than that. The limitation of that liability transfers it to an abstract construction (called a corporation) we just invented. Let's call it a "person" for dramatic effect(after all SCOTUS did). You can either hold a real physical person liable for an injustice they committed, or you can hold an imaginary person liable. There's a difference.
This is often the diverging point between a libertarian outlook on the world, and an authoritarian one.
To the Authoritarian all laws are just social constructs created by governments, thus it is all subjective and there is no objective truth or unethical laws
To libertarians like myself we believe in the Lockean concept of natural rights, where by laws and governments are erected by man to protect those natural rights and any government that goes beyond that goal is Authoritarian and unethical.
To summarize Frédéric Bastiat "The law is the organization of the natural right of lawful defense. It is the substitution of a common force for individual forces. And this common force is to do only what the individual forces have a natural and lawful right to do: to protect persons, liberties, and properties;"
Ethical Governments are formed to enforce this law, these natural rights, to provide a common defense force of a persons natural rights.
Ethical Governments are not formed to control and regulate all aspects of society at all levels and on all subjects
If you believe that there is some sort of natural rights that laws should reflect, than you believe that you can have good laws and bad laws. This implies laws are social constructs (that attempt to model some sort of semi-objective moral truth). If laws were not a social construct but objective rules, it would follow that there is no such thing as a bad law as they are the ground moral truth by basically fiat (which i would call the authortarian view)
I have no idea how you get from me expressing support for the basic idea of natural human rights to "there is no such thing as a bad law".
Of course there still could be bad law and object moral truth. Those laws would be immoral and we have all kinds of unethical and immoral laws today on the books. Many protests and riots have been done recently due to many of these immoral laws
I have no idea how you got from A to B in your comment
You claimed "To the Authoritarian all laws are just social constructs created by governments, thus it is all subjective" with the implication that libertarians (which you are arguing for) believe the opposite.
Thus you are claiming: "laws are not subjective"
By which i took to mean (this might have been a slight leap on my part now that i look at it again): laws are not simply someone's decree, and falliable like all human creations, but instead they have some deep truth or objective reality to them.
I concluded from this: laws cannot be bad, because that contradicts the idea that they have "truth" and are objective.
I don't believe you can judge something objective good or bad. Objective things just "are" they are neither good nor bad. Good and bad are the realm of the subjective.
Good, Ethical and Moral law is then derived from this objective principle
unfortunately, law by no means confines itself to its proper functions. The law has been used to destroy its own objective. The law has placed the collective force at the disposal of the unscrupulous who wish, without risk, to exploit the person, liberty, and property of others. It has converted plunder into a right, in order to protect plunder. And it has converted lawful defense into a crime, in order to punish lawful defense. [2]
Is it such a leap that liability is also a government created construct?
Your two statements are entirely independent.
Then you are conflating labor laws with criminal law. Individuals are already prohibited from doing those things via criminal law. If one party is not paying the other, labor laws are irrelevant yet the behavior remains illegal.
Labor law and criminal law overlap; they aren't disjoint categories.
> Individuals are already prohibited from doing those things via criminal law. If
Yes, criminal labor laws adopted as part of broader regulation of labor practices.
> If one party is not paying the other, labor laws are irrelevant
Obviously untrue; labor laws are relevant whenever labor is being supplied, whether or not it is being paid. Indeed, the current requirement that labor being supplied be paid is part of labor law (and some aspects of it are fairly recent aspects of labor law), like the restriction on economically useful labor being provided via unpaid labor even when characterized as an internship.
Let me try putting it in a way that is (hopefully) freer from legal nitpicking: It's possible to create a system where consenting adults can engage in whatever consensual activities they wish, even when (gasp) money changes hands between them, and still not legalize objectively evil behavior like slavery, negligent homicide, etc. Further, I'd argue we don't even to make new laws to do it, though this part seems to be surprisingly controversial.
> Individuals are already prohibited from doing those things via criminal law. If
> Yes, criminal labor laws adopted as part of broader regulation of labor practices.
You're seriously saying that slavery, poisoning, and battery would be legal if not for labor laws?
Huh? I don't get it - if i understand, you are suggesting that we should kill the concept of the corporation, while still making all law related to operating a business continue to apply to individuals, and somehow that will result in a utopia where nobody gets in the way of two parties consensually working with each other, but at the same time nobody will be abused/coerced? Do i have that right?
Perhaps you don't recall the number of years in which slavery was legal in the US?
Or the years in which child labor was actually used?
Or the years in which a 40 hour work week wasn't normal?
The only way I'm able to understand how ANYONE can believe everything would be hunky dory without labor laws is if they haven't been educated in the history of this country (or any other country).
This is because you argue in bad faith. Apparently you already do understand the point I was making, namely that slavery is outlawed by the 13th amendment to the constitution, not the labor laws regulating consensual employee-employer decisions which the parent poster was talking about.