After the American Revolution, most corporate charters limited investors to ten or twenty votes. Republicanism did not surrender without a struggle. A man with one share is as much a member as a man with fifty, and it is difficult to perceive any substantial difference between a bylaw excluding a member with one share from voting at all, and a bylaw reducing his one vote to a cipher by giving another member fifty or a hundred votes. Of course, the smallholders were indeed reduced to ciphers. As public government was opened to large and growing constituencies, private government came under the control of a small and shrinking elite.
Corporate government is a constitution above the constitution.
This now seems to be the natural, logical and legitimate order of things. Consequently, the most intrepid reformers quake before the lair of the corporate person. In a spirit of ironic glee, these same monopolies, trusts and corporations, unharmed by the law which was to have regulated them, now turn this law against the human beings who were to have been protected. In 1962, Estes Kefauver looked back on a third of a century of the tax and found that the after-tax corporate profit rate was somewhat higher than the profit rate had been before enactment of the tax. He concluded that the entire burden and then some had been passed to consumers.