Asymmetric limited liability

Losses capped for the owners at a distance, uncapped for the people at the work. The oldest structural injustice in how enterprises are owned, and the ancestor of the problem the asset lock answers.

The device is old and specific. A charter grants whoever put up the money a limit on what they can lose — never more than they invested, however much harm the venture does. Nobody grants the corresponding limit to the people actually doing the work, who continue to risk their health, their livelihoods and their lives in full (Agency, not ownership, Proof-of-contribution, Dignity).

The asymmetry is not incidental; it is the whole design. It makes distant ownership rational at scales at which it would otherwise be unthinkable, because the worst case is bounded for the one deciding and unbounded for the ones affected — which is exactly the structure that produces harm nobody intended and nobody is answerable for (Power, Necessity Of Accountability, The Two-Stake Principle, Omniconsideration).

Seen this way, the modern ownership form is not neutral machinery. It is one answer to who bears a venture's downside, and the answer it gives is that those furthest from it bear least (Extraction Of Wealth, Capital Subordinate To Purpose, Tragedy of the Commons).

Which is the rationale beneath several of this corpus's economic instruments, and why they are structural rather than exhortative. Ownership by the people doing the work, so that decider and bearer are the same (Mondragon, Compressed Pay Ratios, The Community Company). An asset lock, so that what the body holds cannot be extracted by whoever ends up holding the paper (The asset lock, Constitutional Protection Of Purpose). And purpose above capital, so that the money is an instrument of the work rather than the reason for it (Capital Subordinate To Purpose, Underwriting The New Economy).

The honest counterweight: limited liability also lets ordinary people take risks they otherwise could not, and abolishing it without replacing its function concentrates enterprise in whoever can afford to lose. What is named here is the asymmetry, not the limit.

Also called: capped above, uncapped below Stands on: Economy · Power · Necessity Of Accountability Opens onto: The asset lock · Compressed Pay Ratios · Agency, not ownership · Capital Subordinate To Purpose · Mondragon · The Community Company · Extraction Of Wealth · The Two-Stake Principle In play: beyond — the question asked of any structure a Cell is about to incorporate into Sources: LIØNSBERG Wiki Books/Aliens, Fascists, and Giants/23. The Corrupt, Fraudulent, and Deceitful Existing Order.md (unmarked — told as one company's history, never abstracted) Open: The source narrates a particular chartered company and does not generalise; the abstraction here is this page's. · It calls the legal form immoral and attributes that judgment to a third party; the judgment is not carried, only the asymmetry. · No alternative is specified that keeps the protective function while removing the asymmetry.