[Buddha-l] Wealth and excess

[jkirk]

Well, if abhidharma doesn't allow a corporation to be an
individual, as the US law does (also international law?
dunno)--then as with many other facets of law, the corp. as
person concept is utterly delusional.
However, I still go with the Middle Way view of wealth. There is
excess, and excess gets people and things into trouble.
Joanna


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

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