🚀 go-pugleaf

> Certainly regulation should be used to prevent the abuse of human rights,
> including the right not to suffer from pollution, but other regulations are
> not needed.  And it is nobody's business to apply them.  Companies are
> voluntary collections of consenting adults: workers and share holders.  One
> should never tell consenting adults what to do (unless they are harming
> people).

Companies are more than this, however.  Large companies possess fairly
extensive resources, and operate within society as though they were
an individual to a certain extent.  For example, it is not an particular
individual in the company who purchases a tract of land, for example,
but the company as a whole.

Suppose that some certain action of a given company affects a group
of people.  They might like to engage in some sort of negotiations
with the company in order to alter or curtail these effects.  As individuals
they have no effective means of engaging in such negotiations.  
Realistically, they must unite themselves into a group, select
representatives, adopt some consistent posistion, and then have
the representatives present that to the company.

I think it is unrealistic to assume that all interactions between
a company and society at large can be carried out in this manner.
There is too much overhead in establishing a cohesive group which can
be effective in dealing with a company.  In such a society, companies
effectively operate independent of the wishes of society soley as a
result of ``organizational inertia''.

Ideally, one of the functions  of government is providing an established 
mechanism through which people can interact with companies.  Despite
the fact that government is, in practice, not particularly responsive
I am more reasonably represented in the ``society of companies'' than
I would be otherwise.
--
Terry Coatta (coatta@cs.ubc.ca)
Dept. of Computer Science, UBC, Vancouver BC, Canada

`What I lack in intelligence, I more than compensate for with stupidity'