:06:01
for as long as I have
:06:02
without ever having
been asked so pointedly
:06:05
to say what I think
a corporation is.
:06:09
... it is one form of
business ownership...?
:06:13
It's a group of individuals
working together to serve
:06:16
a variety of objectives.
:06:18
The principal one
of which is earning large
:06:21
growing sustained
legal returns
:06:25
for the people who
own the business.
:06:33
The modern corporation has
grown out of the industrial age.
:06:39
The industrial age
began in 1712
:06:42
with an Englishman named
Thomas Newcomen
:06:45
invented a steam driven
pump to pump water
:06:48
out of the English coalmine
so the English coalminers
:06:51
could get more
coal to mine
:06:53
rather than hauling
buckets of water
:06:56
out of the mine
:06:57
It was all about productivity
more coal per man hour.
:07:01
That was the dawn of
the industrial age.
:07:03
And then it became more
steel per man hour
:07:06
more textiles
per man hour
:07:08
more automobiles
per man hour
:07:10
and today it's more
chips per man hour
:07:12
more gizmos per man hour.
:07:14
The system is basically
the same system
:07:17
producing more
sophisticated products today.
:07:24
The dominant role of
corporations in our lives
:07:27
is essentially a product of
roughly the past century.
:07:31
Corporations were originally
associations of people
:07:35
who were chartered
by a state
:07:37
to perform some
particular function.
:07:39
Like a group of people
want to build abridge
:07:41
over the Charles River
or something like that.
:07:45
There were very few
chartered corporations
:07:48
in early United
States history.
:07:50
And the ones that existed
had clear stipulations
:07:54
in their state
issued charters
:07:56
how long they
could operate
:07:58
the amount of
capitalization