Pluralistic: A perforated corporate veil (20 Feb 2026)

Should the goal be to assign culpability to shareholders though?

Surely one of the important aspects of joint-stock corporations is that a very clear distinction is made between the owners (shareholders) of a corporation, and the management (executives) of that corporation - who might both be the same small-knit group of people (especially in the case of private ltd corps), but might not (esp. in the case of public ltd corps).

Management might be answerable to the shareholders, but they are operationally independent. If management decides to perform a snail-farm tax evasion scam, then yes, it is a problem that when the scam is discovered the taxpayers might not be able to claw back the taxes owed. But tax evasion is a criminal offence. The people who commit it - the executives who decided to institute the scam - should be able to be found guilty of a crime and punished according to the law.

If someone commits a robbery, the punishment is not limited to just recovering and returning the funds to the person who was robbed. The act of robbery itself is a problem, and prosecuted independently of whether funds could be recovered and returned.

IMO the problem with out current late-stage capitalistic hellscape is not so much that the owners of companies cannot be found and made financially liable for monetary harm caused by those companies’ misdeeds, but that prosecutors seemingly choose not to find the executives of those companies and make them criminally liable for the actual law-breaking that has taken place.