Transcript

The corporation is a wealth creation vehicle. It's a place for people to put money for a common enterprise without taking on certain risks that they would otherwise incur. If you put money into a corporation, you get a share of the profits, and that corporation can organize itself or can be organized by professional managers to use that money more efficiently than any one person could. I mean, think about an assembly line, right? You have a bunch of people on an assembly line making a chair. Instead of one person doing every step in the process, there's one person who's creating dowel rods and another person that's sanding and another person that's chopping wood and another person that's painting. And it's just more efficient if you go out there and you do one job all day. You bring all the pieces together, you can start making more chairs. If you can make more chairs with the same number of hours, you can sell that chair for less money. And now that chair, which is every bit as good as the chair made by a single person, if it's just as good and it costs you less money, you can make a profit selling it for less. And now there's cheaper chairs to sit on. Now, people can buy a chair and still have enough money for soup for dinner. That's value, that creates value, right? That now we have more value in society because we were able to have this collective enterprise. And corporations can do this because one, they exist separately from the people who own them. They're their own thing. So you put money into a corporation and now that corporation has resources with which it can engage in commerce and construction and manufacture, et cetera. The second thing is that if you put money into a corporation, you are not at risk of losing more in general than you put in. And this is called limited liability. That will encourage you to invest in the first place. So let's say that someone in Microsoft goes to China and needs to get a shipment off a boat and gives the guy $10,000 to get a permit to make it happen. These sort of things happen, right? It's called bribery. It's illegal, but it happens. Well, that's a violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. And it could result in millions of dollars of penalties to the company. Imagine that if you having put a hundred dollars into Microsoft, now were personally liable for that manager's violation of the FCPA. That would discourage you from investing in the first place. It's a huge amount of personal liability that you can't oversee. So the imposition of limited liability is a requirement, otherwise we simply wouldn't have people passively invest in corporations. You would only invest in things you could monitor. And again, monitoring is very expensive. There's still risks of course, in investing in corporations. But the risks are primarily around losing the money you've invested. No one's going to come and take your house. And that really encourages investment because that allows us to invest an amount that we're comfortable with. We have certainty, and hopefully that's an amount you can afford to lose. But then of course, if things go well, you get a share of the gain.

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