Elizabeth Warren Doesn't Understand Business

In a few days we are likely to have as President-elect a woman who has repeatedly said she is an enemy of “the corporation.” 

She also had to play on the same team as the most dangerous woman in the nation, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. Mrs. Warren has repeatedly hectored the nation on the dangers of “the corporation,” which does not cry, does not feel pain, does not love, according to a speech Mrs. Warren gave in 2012.

Now, Mrs. Warren is a Native American and she is also a professor at Harvard Law School, both mighty credentials. 

But Mrs. Warren knows little about the way the economy works. The corporation is at this point just a data point in some state government’s files. It is like a contract or a driver’s license number. That’s the legal quality of the corporation.

However, of course, a corporation is owned by people, and if it’s a large corporation, it’s owned by a great many people, except in rare instances. At all times, it’s owned by people of some kind, even if it’s people in a foundation or the beneficiaries of the corporation’s foundation.

Those people receive the benefits of the corporation’s earnings and dividends and capital gains. Those earnings and dividends and capital gains pay for retirement, for medical care, for school, for housing, for just plain living.

They also pay for museums and art galleries and scholarships for inner city children without fathers and mothers.

The corporation’s work is done largely by people. Its products and services are used by people who cry and laugh and feel sad just as people who work for Harvard do. By the way, I wonder if Mrs. Warren, who works for Harvard, knows how much of her salary, which recently came down to far, far, far more than $1,000 per hour of classroom work, comes from the corporate stock in Harvard’s gargantuan portfolio. I assume Mrs. Warren laughs and cries and feels pain, and she does much of it on the dime of the corporations.

By one of the great ironies of politics, Senator Warren’s specialty is bankruptcy law. Her specialty is helping companies in bad shape reorganize so they don’t have to pay people who have loaned money to the corporation and people who have worked or sold goods and services to the corporation.

Anyway, Mrs. Professor Warren and Senator Sanders whipped up hatred of “the corporation” to such a fever pitch in the Democratic primaries that Mrs. Clinton had to move to the corporation haters’ side of the table.

Never mind that she gets two or three hundred thousand dollars per speech to corporations and especially finance corporations. Now, she says she is going to whip the corporations into shape.

This idea that an agglomeration of human beings organized as a corporation is somehow more evil and in need of some more restraint than other organizations of humans such as unions or street gangs just makes no sense at all.

To read the full article, please visit: The American Spectator.

Ben Stein is a writer, actor, and lawyer who served as a speechwriter in the Nixon administration as the Watergate scandal unfolded. He began his unlikely road to stardom when director John Hughes as the numbingly dull economics teacher in the urban comedy, "Ferris Bueller's Day Off." Read more more reports from Ben Stein — Click Here Now.