Firm emancipation

The firm can be a transient entity.  Rather like a human being in a way.  It can live, it can die, it can thrive and struggle, it can experience ups and downs in cycles.  Novelists tell us that each human is individual, unique, one of a kind.  But sociologists, psychologists and anthropologists see us in our commonalities, examine the motives and cultural pressures which form us.  One approach does not necessarily obviate the other.  So it is with firms.  We all have multiple purposes in our own lives, but with the firm, there is one predominating purpose, which is the creation of value (that is, capital, that is, wealth) for the owners of the firm.  So the firm is in this sense monochrome - the caricature of a slave - a human whose current purpose is in making money for its owner.

How this came to be is itself an interesting part of American corporate history. In short, a rail road company liked the idea that it too, like citizens, could get a tax benefit on the mortgages it had.  To do this, they successfully argued that firms are sufficiently like people that they can avail themselves of individual tax benefits.  It relies on the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment of the US Constitution, which came into law in 1868, a couple of years after Lincoln's anti-slavery victory.  This amendment was designed to solidify the 1866 civil rights act.

The equal protection clause says:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The issue had been that many beaten confederate states, post Lincoln's victory, has enacted state legislation preventing black people from enjoying rights as full as the victors wanted.  The 'equal protection' provision was thus born.  

Roll forward to 1886 and the Southern Pacific Railway Company managed to get companies to be considered under this equal protection clause, hence allowing it to get the tax rebate it wanted.

Think about it.  A company managed to use civil rights legislation to win rights for itself and hence pay fewer taxes.  The 'equal protection' perspective goes like this: the constitution prevents states enacting laws which enable unequal protection of persons.  And persons gets interpreted to mean corporate bodies.  The rail road companies got to keep their taxes.