(Under capitalism) many costs of having PtLds are externalized.
this is a big differences... I think tomp is explaining this difference somewhere in this thread.
I'd wager that at a societal level we roughly break even +/- a little bit in either direction. For every mega-corp abusing their legal status there's a few thousand small and medium businesses that do not have to worry (as much) about being sued into oblivion by some ambulance chaser over something that is not the result of malice. (I'm speaking about various private liability limiting corporate structures in general here.)
The possibility to bankrupt a company without losing more than you put into the venture is in my eyes a feature of capitalism, not a bug.
This is why I think the argument that a corporation only has a duty to it's stockholders is rank bullshit.
Limited liability is directly as and exactly an externalization of costs; that's all that it is.
It's one that evolved hand in hand with capitalism, sure, but if it exists in a non-capitalist system it has the same effect.
