Age of corporations

I read an interesting article pointing out that if life expectancy was going up, the maximum age for hu­mans remains steadily at 114 years. If corporations are people too, and should therefore obtain all the rights that have been granted to the human kind of people, should they not be granted mortality? According to Tolkien, it is a gift.

Looking at the list of the oldest corporations in the world, I realised some are really old: six are more than 1200 years old, the oldest being a Ryōkan in Japan, of course. One interesting fact is that among the very old companies, nearly 90% have less than 300 employees. Clearly obesity is dangerous for your health, even if you are a corporation…

2 thoughts on “Age of corporations

  1. “The maximum age for hu­mans remains steadily at 114 years”. Thus, Jeanne Calment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment) actually died 8 years before her legal date of death: the retirement home owners kept the secret to continue receiving her retiring allowance :-)

  2. Killing healthy firms would not do any good, but I firmly believe in death penalty for companies. In the most brutal and bloody way of course: termination of all contracts, splitting of the wealth between the state, the plaintiffs and the customers, patents in the public domain, and so on.

    Well, something must be done to mitigate effects on innocent people and other companies, but the moral must be that a company must not simply think it can write a check to solve a problem: if it forgets that its goal in life is to serve customers and stay legal and moral (including in other countries), it must disappear. People, patents, plants, have values, not the shell company. Some oil or weapon companies should have been dismantled for long…

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