Great new law review article by Walter Block and Huebert, Defending Corporations, Cumberland Law Review 39:2 (2009): 363-85. They demolish the anti-corporation argument of Van Eeghen published in the Journal of Libertarian Studies in 2005 (The Corporation at Issue, Part I: The Clash of Classical Liberal Values and the Negative Consequences for Capitalist Practices and The Corporation at Issue, Part II: A Critique of Robert Hessen’s In Defense of the Corporation and Proposed Conditions for Private Incorporation).
For other discussion of this issue, see my Legitimizing the Corporation and Other Posts.
Update: See also Bill Anderson’s Economic Calculation and the Courts: A Theory of Hoaxes, in the same issue of the Cumberland Law Review (then-Cumberland law student Brad Edmonds was instrumental in helping to place these articles with the journal).
Abstract:
Government courts often are subject to hoaxes in which false crimes are reported and then pursued by prosecutors. From the Salem Witch Trials of 1692 to what was called the “Duke Rape Hoax” in Durham, North Carolina, not to mention the numerous child molestation hoaxes of the 1980s and 1990s, people were charged and sometimes convicted on what nearly everyone today realizes were false charges. In this paper, I examine two court-induced hoaxes from an Austrian point of view. I apply the economic calculation analysis as developed by Mises and Rothbard as well as more general principles of Austrian Economics to explain why hoaxes would be prevalent in government courts, and why they continue.
[Mises Blog cross-post]
