A corporation in the US is a legal fiction that creates a pseudo-person distinct from the owners, providing privileges to operate and legal protections for the owners. A corporation does not require many employees, which you seem to imply are required. The owners are the main component of a corporation not the employees.
By the way corporate personhood is not a legal fiction as in the term of art, it's a legal principle. More like a fact of law than a fiction.
I know in context you don't intend that but just a pejorative based around the fact corporations are a legal structure. Although I'm always puzzled by what the actual problem with this is. And I'll go on a tangent from the topic.
The legal system is fictional in basically the same way a corporation is. So is all other aspects of a government. Even the legal rights that a real person has are just about as far removed from flesh and blood as the legal entity of a corporation is from the brick and mortar and people that make up a corporation (for those corporations that have such corporeal bodies).
Having almost no appreciation for legal systems or their history, I would also guess that the idea a stroke of the pen suddenly gives birth to corporations which spread their ruin across the earth is backward, or at least much more complicated. Usually it is the legal system catching up with reality, solving problems like regulating existing practice of the time. Laws are shaped by society as much or maybe more than society is is shaped by laws, in my opinion.
I mean, argue specific problems of corporate law, but the general disparagement of "legal make-believe" I don't understand. The entire legal system is built on it, there's a lot of good things that are done with it.
I appreciate your comment, but I'm not sure what your point is. Corporate personhood is literally a legal fiction due to the granting of personhood in order to fall under the umbrella of existing law. This personhood is accepted as true, even though it is objectively untrue; this is a textbook example of a legal fiction.
Maybe I have the wrong understanding. I thought the legal concept of a "person" can be said to be a legal fiction https://www.jstor.org/stable/1342652, but a corporation is not. It's a real thing that is created and exists according to corporate law. That might happen to use legal fictions as part of its definition, but the corporation is not a legal fiction.
But even if I was right there, I would agree I was trying to be overly pedantic and ended up distracting from the point I was trying to make.
Thanks. I understand now what you meant. I see that I should have worded my comment better, now that you have pointed that out to me. A corporation is a legal creation which has the legal-fiction of personhood associated with it.
A corporation doesn't require any employees. Like you said, it's a legal fiction. My point was that the corporations that "create enormous amounts of value" (GP's words) are those same corporations that have employees, and the "value" described therein is really the value of the labor of those employees.
There's no metaphysical Lockean value production going on inside of a corporation. When it produces value, the value it produces is the value that its employees produce. Waxing poetic about the value of corporations is thusly mostly a game of smoke and mirrors that obscures the real source of that value (the humans doing the work), and detracts from the actual advantage that comes from incorporation (i.e., solving the coordination game and thereby extracting more value from workers).
> from the actual advantage that comes from incorporation (i.e., solving the coordination game and thereby extracting more value from workers).
In my experience the value of incorporating has not been to hire people but the legal protections and ability to create certain tax structures for retirement planning that benefit the owners.
> A corporation doesn't require any employees.
In reality some employees are required in order to keep the corporate designation that allows the use of certain retirement plans.
