With the economic illiterates occupying Wall Street, it's time to revisit the defense of corporations that I offered in my essay Reflections on Twenty Years in Law Teaching:
I tell my students about Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, who wrote that: “The limited liability corporation is the greatest single discovery of modern times. Even steam and electricity are less important than the limited liability company.”
I tell them about journalists John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, whose magnificent history, The Company, contends that the corporation is “the basis of the prosperity of the West and the best hope for the future of the rest of the world.”[1]
There is no doubt that the corporation is now the key economic institution in Western nations. In the United States, for example, the corporation is the predominant form of business organization by every measure except sheer number of firms. According to recent census data, although corporations account for only about one fifth of all business organizations, they bring in almost 90% of all business receipts.
The corporation also has proven to be a powerful engine for focusing the efforts of individuals to maintain economic liberty. Because tyranny is far more likely to come from the public sector than the private, those who for selfish reasons strive to maintain both a democratic capitalist society and, of particular relevance to the present argument, a substantial sphere of economic liberty therein serve the public interest. Put another way, private property and freedom of contract were “indispensable if private business corporations were to come into existence.”[2] In turn, by providing centers of power separate from government, corporations give “liberty economic substance over and against the state.”[3]
Yet, two centuries ago, leading business and economic thinkers – including the great Adam Smith – derided the joint stock company. Few businesses were organized as chartered companies. Each company’s charter required a special legislative act. In many places, legislatures granted charters only to quasi-public entities, such as railroads and canals. In most, legislatures rarely resisted the temptation to revise or even repeal existing charters arbitrarily. Even in the United States, where the Supreme Court’s famous Dartmouth College decision gave corporations substantial constitutional protections at a relatively early date, such legislative meddling remained commonplace.
And so I ask my students: What explains the relatively rapid development in the mid-19th century of a recognizably modern corporation and, in turn, that entity’s emergence as the dominant form of economic organization?
The answer has to do with new technologies – especially the railroad – requiring vast amounts of capital, the advantages such large firms derived from economies of scale, the emergence of limited liability that made it practicable to raise large sums from numerous passive investors, and the rise of professional management.
For the most part, these advantages remain true today. The corporation remains the engine of economic growth, both at the level of giants like Microsoft and garage-based start-ups.
The rise of the corporate form thus has “improved the living standards of millions of ordinary people, putting the luxuries of the rich within the reach of the man in the street.”[4] The rising prosperity made possible by the tremendous new wealth created by industrial corporations was a major factor in destroying arbitrary class distinctions, enhancing personal and social mobility. Many of the wealthiest businessman of the latter half of the 19th Century and the 20th Century began their careers as laborers rather than as scions of coupon-clipping plutocrats.
[1] John Micklethwait & Adrian Wooldridge, The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea (2003).
[2] Michael Novak, Toward a Theology of the Corporation 45 (rev. ed.1990).
[3] Id.
[4] Micklethwait & Wooldridge, supra note 5, at 77.
