This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, November 23rd, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The old model of granting corporate charters, handed enormous power to a tiny group of elites.

Anthony Kamegna, host of the Liberty Chronicles podcast, explains how the old corporate arrangement

caused an anti-rent struggle in New York, starting in the 1830s.

We are here again to discuss another little-known piece of American history that touches on corporations, on the power of

elites across an ocean to implant themselves as the ruling class.

So tell us about this, the origins of this fight that culminates with a war on rent in New York.

Yeah, so this is another one of these Jacksonian popular rebellions.

We've talked about the Door War on the podcast. We've talked about the Canadian

rebellions in the late 1830s. The New York Anti-Rent War lasted from say 1839 to about 1846 and it was rooted in the long long

prehistory of the state of New York going all the way back to the Dutch settlement of the colony in the early 1600s.

The Dutch, when they settled, they had a states general that was ruled in Holland by a group of wealthy plutocrats

and their plan was to through corporate charters granted by the States General,

give to more Dutch plutocrats a gigantic land grants in the colonies to do with whatever they please.

Basically it was a transmission of the feudal system of medieval Europe, even in the more

democratic form of the recently created, you know in the more democratic form of the recently created United Provinces of the Netherlands,

even though it was comparatively liberal to the medieval states, it maintained this medieval function of the government doling out rights and privileges

to special chartered individuals.

Which is very different from how we understand corporations now. I can walk down to the courthouse and start one today.

I don't know the courthouse but presumably yes some building will we'll do that for you.

You just you know show that you have a certain amount of capital and you sign your

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