How Corporate America Went Full Left

by Stephan Kinsella on May 19, 2026

Kinsella, Corporate Personhood, Limited Liability, and Double Taxation, LibertarianStandard.com (Oct. 18, 2011), including:

“How Corporate America Went Full Left,” Stateless Standard (May 19, 2026):

Corporate America didn’t “go woke” because its executives suddenly discovered compassion or equality. They danced with the left because that’s where the power and protection rackets live.

How Corporate America Went Full Left – And Why It Was Never About Woke

This isn’t idealism, it’s the oldest scam in the book: the powerful using government to rig the game against the stateless rest of us. Let’s rip the mask off with some real history.

The Socialist Razor Baron

Back in 1924, King Camp Gillette — the guy who made his fortune with disposable razor blades — teamed up with Upton Sinclair, the muckraker who wrote The Jungle. Together they pushed a book promoting Gillette’s longtime obsession: a single, gigantic, vertically integrated socialist corporation that would run everything from mines to your dinner table, enforcing equality through central planning.

Gillette had been floating this fever dream since his 1894 book The Human Drift. His utopia? A monopoly corporation armed with state-granted privileges, controlling production, distribution, and wealth redistribution. Nothing screams “workers’ paradise” like one giant boardroom with government-backed exclusivity deciding who gets what.

Murray Rothbard saw right through it. In classic Austrian fashion, he pointed out the fatal flaw: massive corporations suffer the exact same economic calculation problem as governments. Without genuine market prices, you can’t allocate resources efficiently — whether the central planner wears a crown, a commissar’s hat, or a CEO’s suit. Rothbard also demolished the idea that corporations are inherently creatures of state privilege. To him, they’re simply voluntary associations of individuals pooling capital. No special sauce from the sovereign required.

This wasn’t some academic quibble. It exposed the deeper tension in how Americans have viewed corporations for centuries.

From State Agents to (Sort of) Free Associations

After the American Revolution, states handed out corporate charters like candy, mostly for infrastructure like turnpikes, canals, banks, and railroads. Under the old “grant theory,” corporations were state-created artificial persons designed to serve “public purposes.” They got monopoly privileges, special favors, and tight legislative oversight. Classic mercantilism repackaged as progress. Legislatures could revoke charters on a whim. Power stayed cozy with the connected.