Defending Free Business & Private Property with Enhanced Fiduciary Duty

Corporate leaders do not fulfill fiduciary duty to shareholders in the spirit of the laws by allowing company property, some of which enables strategic advantage over free nations, to slide into the maw of autocracy. The Congress and legislatures of the United States, the 50 states, and U.S.-based business lobbies have embraced a zombified version of fiduciary duty to deliver short range profits while handing corporate property rights to autocrats for market access.

The foundation of free business is constitutional republican democracy (CRD) without which no private business would be free to innovate, own, hold and use private property according to the will of its ownership. Nor would business leaders be free to manage supply and demand to serve the best interests of shareholders, customers, suppliers, creditors, and vendors.

IP-rights-for-market-access and other autocrat-leveraged arrangements divert taxable royalty revenues away from U.S., state, and local tax bases to authoritarian regime accounts.

The spirit, rule of law, and policy question for CRD-based businesses is this:

Should Congress legislate that business decision makers’ fiduciary duty to shareholders includes the duty to uphold the sovereignty of their CRD that in return provide for the security and rights of lawful U.S. businesses and workforces? The answer is an overdue yes.

If fiduciary duty law does not expand to embolden corporate leaders to uphold CRD in international business relations, China and Russia will continue to manipulate free nations’ shallow fiduciary duty law to serve relatively short term shareholder profits over the perpetuity of private property and free business rights themselves.

Corporate decision makers will continue to fear shareholder liability under current profit-centered fiduciary duty law should they reject autocratic offers of market access.

Under the currently anemic fiduciary duty law scheme, U.S. and allied CRDs are on the ropes after immense strategic losses in intellectual property, trade secrets, energy market share, gray influence warfare, and competitive advantage to China and Russia.

Congress must act to legislate a constitutionally-expanded definition of officers’ and directors’ fiduciary duties to uphold CRD as the source, guarantor, and guardian of private-propertied, free business.