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Originally Posted by roachboy
the fiction of a social contract is nothing more than that: a projection backward in time of legal and institutional arrangements that obtain at a given moment. it doesnt work the other way around--there is no social contract that constititues the basis of any given legal arrangement, not in the literal sense. another way: you dont seriously believe that there were at some point "states of nature" do you?
the simple fact of the matter is that markets are legal constructs. corporations are legal entities. economic activity is hedged round with law--it presupposes law (e.g. contracts) to operate at all.
law is a public institution, like it or not.
nothing about this changes if you resort to the fiction of a social contract. so there is a sense in which everything about capitalist activity is public.
there is also a sense in which much of that activity can also be understood as private.
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I would agree with you roachboy that capitalism can exist because it needs a specific kind of environment in which to work, and that this environment is made my governments, which are public institutions. However, I would not argue that because these public institutions, which are instruments of the people whose prosperity they are meant to facilitate, that corporations are inherently "public" entities themselves.
The drafters of the constitution, specifically Alexander Hamilton, placed the sovereignty of an individual's private property as being paramount importance to the sustainability of a democtatic capitalist state. While I do understand your point, it seems to me you're sweeping the concept of private property under the rug.
If you argue that corporations exist because by the design of public institutions, and therefore these institutions, and the public inherently, have a right to govern corporations, how do you maintain consistency with the principle of private property? How can it only apply to some people, and not others? Why should only the fabulously rich be unprotected by this law? And once you cross that line, where does it stop?
The logic you're using would make sense to me if we were talking about a neo-socialist state, in which some of the mechanisms from both capitalism and socialism were combined to form a new type of government and a new type of economy. That being said, how can you argue that the logic you're using assumes a capitalist state at all?