Sure, the plan (of LLCs) was always to limit liability but initially _who_ could incorporate wasn't literally everybody.
Like the founding fathers ran their business as themselves. There isn't some Monticello LLC that Thomas Jefferson was CEO of so if TJ did something bad then he's personally liable for it. This is what's changed and is the problem, people get LLCs in situations they really don't deserve them in.
IIRC the modern corporation as a legal entity was created in response to the high capital and high risk requirements embodied in early western shipping ventures. The first stock exchange ("bourse") for this was actually French(?) (hazy here, possibly Belgian or Dutch, and probably roots in Hanseatic League financing if not beyond). FWIW there's a whole subset of the antiques world which deals in share notes - promissory notes issued to people funding capital intensive ventures like new railway lines, often beautifully decorated and serial numbered for nominal security against forgery.
AFAIK the follow-on concern of manipulation of the modern legal environment as a tool for unencumbered multinational greed really began with entities like the East India Company being empowered by pontificating rulers back home granting because-I-said-so immunity for arbitrary actions outside their borders, thus establishing the ground work for industrial scale opium trading, piracy, slavery, and banana republics. We're in a period of relative reckoning now where the cash-piles thus accrued are facing some popular scrutiny, but there'll never be recompense. As we've reached the ends of the earth and new wealth to seize has become scarce, we've turned to speculation and beyond earth to mars, the metaverse, and media in general. Stock markets are largely society's greed temples and in some cases designed for money laundering (eg. Singapore stock market for the Burmese junta). Even small companies on the public markets are worth orders of magnitude more than you can earn in a lifetime, leading to an intellectual drain toward speculative systemic value extraction instead of productive ventures.
IMHO a naive hope of crypto was a reckoning, instead we received the opposite: increased speculation, libertarian multinational economics and now abject political profiteering. No action on critical issues like climate. Less international trust and diplomatic potential than we've had since WWII - truly, we are lost. But it's less a conspiracy than a back-scratching piggy trough of reverent greed-inertia, in which all pigs are created equal but a cabal of investment bankers are more equal than others. Meanwhile everyone else slave for their locally dangled currency carrot, backed primarily by golden handcuffs of mortgages, an inertia of ignorance, a charade of democratic process, increasing global population dependence on multinational trade to meet quality of life expectations, and conveniently captured choke points like identity (The End of the Nation State: The Rise of Regional Economies), food (Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System), regulation (Preventing Regulatory Capture: Special Interest Influence and How to Limit It), international logistics (The Outlaw Ocean, International Shipping Cartels), energy (Energy Revolutions: Profiteering versus Democracy), education (Privatizing the Public University), media (Selective Control: The Political Economy of Censorship) and weaponized finance (Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, Mortgaged Democracy).
It is perhaps not overly hyperbolic to state that the challenge of our era is to determine a mode of capturing the power of emergent technology to undo this situation, and nothing less than the fate of the planet rests on doing so.
> It is perhaps not overly hyperbolic to state that the challenge of our era is to determine a mode of capturing the power of emergent technology to undo this situation, and nothing less than the fate of the planet rests on doing so.
Eugenics that select for altruism, empathy and cooporation and against greed and egotism. It's absurd to keep this subject taboo as we're staring down the apocalypse. Rather everyone goes down with the ship than consider something drastic that might go against what I was taught as a kid
Haha :) I think evolution shows centralist solutions don't end well. GATTACA comes to mind. It'd be nice if we all did something positive and chillaxed a bit instead of fervently lining our piggy-troughs to the detriment of all other piggies, non-piggies and future piggies. So practically, that means, like - don't marry an investment banker, a politician, or a sociopath corporate ladderite.
Like the founding fathers ran their business as themselves. There isn't some Monticello LLC that Thomas Jefferson was CEO of so if TJ did something bad then he's personally liable for it. This is what's changed and is the problem, people get LLCs in situations they really don't deserve them in.