Did I just step over into the dark side?
She comes in peace and means no harm
Blue Mouse Monkey is now a corporation. It all happened rather quickly, after a new tax preparer talked me into it. His main reason: sole props and LLCs have a 3-5% audit rate by the IRS. Corporations: 0.8%. There was a host of other reasons, too, to do with taxes (naturally, since he’s a tax-preparer), but the main thing was avoiding audits. Also, apparently corporations get audited by better auditors, less likely to be petty bureaucrats who sweat the small stuff. In this tax-preparer’s opinion.
Okay, so that was a quick flip. Corporations are bad, right? End corporate personhood and all that. (Interesting discussion of why here.) And now I’m one of them? Or, more accurately, I’ve created one of them. Unlike when I was an LLC and I and my LLC were legally the same thing, now that Blue Mouse Monkey is a corporation, I am not it and it is not me. The corporation of Blue Mouse Monkey is a separate legal entity. In fact, I will be on its payroll! I can no longer just dip into my business account for an owner’s draw. I will get a salary (which, also being the President, I feel confident I can negotiate a fair one 
Interestingly, I can also lease things to it. Like my trademark. How weird is that?! And if I die, Blue Mouse Monkey lives on. To what purpose I don’t know, but maybe someone would want to take up the furry little creature…
Okay, so while I’ve created a corporation, I haven’t created a monster. It’s not a publicly traded company, for one thing. And sure, profits to the shareholders is a primary goal, but I’m the only shareholder, and not being of independent means, I must work to eat. So profit’s a good thing here.
Is it possible to be an ethical corporation? To answer that question I borrowed this list of ‘What’s wrong with corporations?’ from corporation-free.org.
For all corporations, three things matter: popularity, property and profit. But the greatest of these is profit.
Popularity is important, yes. I need to be popular in order to attract new business. I need to maintain my reputation of delivering quality work on time. But I don’t create manipulative ad campaigns to persuade people of that, I just rely on word of mouth. So I think I’m OK there.
Property. Well, I don’t have much. Just some office equipment. You don’t need much to run a web design business, so I don’t think Blue Mouse Monkey is much of a threat to anyone in that regard.
Profit. Like I said, I gotta eat. So does everyone else, so I am not exceptional in that regard in hoping that my enterprise does better than break even, and brings me enough money to have a life.
It is easier to make a profit if you can:
- Persuade people to buy low-quality stuff.
- Pay less to the people who work for you.
- Limitlessly consume the Earth’s resources.
- Ignore the pollution that you produce.
- Influence governments and avoid taxes.
Unfortunately, the pursuit of profit leads some corporations to behave rather badly.
Indeed it is easier to make a profit if you do the above. I breathed a sigh of relief, however, when I saw that none of the items on the list apply to Blue Mouse Monkey.
As an employee of Blue Mouse Monkey I only do high quality work, and would never persuade someone to purchase a service or product that wasn’t right for them. In fact, I end up talking people into cheaper alternatives half the time. And as President, I certainly pay my subcontractors very well. As president I probably consume fewer of the earth’s resources than the average person-of-the-North, because I don’t eat meat, I don’t have a clothes-dryer or dishwasher, and I walk or cycle to work most days. Sure, my employee (myself) runs a computer for hours at a time in a heated/cooled space, but then she’d be doing that if she had a desk job in some company. As for ignoring the pollution I produce - well, maybe I am guilty of that. But I don’t see the pollution I produce, so it’s hard to keep it top-of-mind. I think about it from time to time. And at home the President’s electricity comes from PGE’s wind power plan…it all gets a bit murky after that. Then there’s ‘influence governments and avoid taxes’. Hell yeah I’m gonna influence governments! As a citizen, though, not as a corporation. Just like I always have as part of the anti-war movement and other activisty activities. Letters to representatives, demonstrations, and so on. And avoid taxes? Not as a citizen. When I draw my salary, I’ll be paying taxes on it like everyone else. I’ll have a W2 at the end of the year and pay my share into the communal pool. I believe in paying taxes. I’ve benefitted hugely from institutions supported by taxes. From roads to education to grants your (and my) tax dollars have made my life (and yours) way better than it would have been in some hardscrabble no-tax system.
My favorite McDonalds
Okay, so corporation-free’s message is really to avoid major multinationals that are despoiling the environment, pressuring governments, exploiting workers, and encouraging greed among their own. But it’s really important for me and the furry blue creature to keep the dangers of corporate personhood in mind, and not take for granted our position nor our actions in this fabric of society and web of life.
There’s corporations, and then there’s corporations. Blue Mouse Monkey is going to be a good one.