[Buddha-l] Wealth and excess

[Richard Hayes]

On Thu, 2009-01-15 at 10:24 -0700, jkirk wrote:

> If corporations are treated in law as persons, does that mean
> they are subject to the law of karma?

Isn't Andrew Jackson supposed to have said that corporations have no
bodies and therefore cannot be whipped and have no souls and therefore
cannot be condemned to hell? That corporations cannot be punished was
for Jackson sufficient reason to avoid giving them any rights and to
make sure they were strongly regulated. (This may have been the only
wise and noble thing that Jackson ever said as during an otherwise
disastrous and despicable presidency.)

As for the abhidharma of karma, nothing has karma except things that
have a samskāra-skandha. The last I checked, no corporation (or nation)
has that particular skandha (although many act in skandhalous ways). We
may have to abandon the idea of discussing the current meltdown in terms
of corporate karma, but we can surely discuss it in terms of the
individual karma of quite a few million people who were having so much
fun making money that they forgot to inquire into whether the money they
thought they were making actually existed.
 
> The vast illegal, as well as greedy and delusional, behavior that
> recently hit the financial markets of the world, seems to me to
> illustrate the danger of any human entity, whether an individual
> like Madoff, or corporations like AIG et al., having too much
> wealth.

The amount of wealth may not be the root of the problem. The lack of
responsible oversight and governmental regulation is at the root of the
maldistribution of wealth. As Bhikkhu Buddhadasa never tired of pointing
out, the Buddha-dhamma is uncompromisingly socialistic. I think we could
safely say that, assessed from a Buddhist perspective, George W. Bush
was not a very dharmacentric president. As Bill Moyers has pointed out
repeatedly, the tendency of the Bush administration was always to put
foxes in the position of guarding the chickens, as a result of which the
foxes got fat and the chickens got gobbled up.

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico