A response to “Occupy Duke banner an affront to reason”

I was troubled to read Derek Speranza’s Oct. 26 letter to the editor titled: “Occupy Duke banner an affront to reason.” Speranza argues that the Occupy Duke banner, currently displayed on the Main Quad that reads, “A democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth” is not merely “misguided” but “is exactly wrong.” Speranza writes that corporations survive solely on the principle of explicit consent while the government “remains the only entity that may seize—or was it extract?—wealth and property from the earth and its people explicitly without consent.”

Speranaza misapprehends what guides corporations and governments.

Democracies, as democracies, seek consent through regular elections. Those things ours can do without explicit consent, moreover, are the product of past supermajoritarian consent, and even for their implementation depend on officials elected by and answerable to the people. The goal of our government, it seems to me, is to do what most people want most of the time, as well as it can. If it fails, it is replaced. Our government, therefore, both seeks and depends upon consent. In that sense, its “power” derives from consent.

Now consider corporations. As Speranza would have it, corporations exist on the basis of consent because “every purchase is an act of consent” without which “a corporation ceases to exist.” But this is naive. On an open market, buyers and sellers do not care to whom they sell or from whom they buy. Nor do notions like “consent” make much sense when, say, corporations knowingly convey the false impression that they are financially sound because it is legal to do so. As Wall Street would be quick to tell you, if it is legal and it maximizes shareholder value, it is a corporation’s fiduciary duty to exploit. Corporations serve their own interests, and ignore whatever burden they place on society, even if that burden is unfair, unjust or most importantly for present purposes, unconsented to.

I think Speranza would benefit from thinking further on this point. For in the next election, when the government again comes to him for his consent, he will be given the opportunity to demand that corporations first obtain it before extracting further wealth “from the people and the Earth.”

Andrew Tutt
Trinity ’09, Yale Law School, ’13