corporations are not citizens
Topics: Democracy
24 Jan 2008
From: "Ervan Darnell (by way of Ervan Darnell )"
Several times I have heard liberals complains that corporations should not have the same rights as citizens. They don't. But why is this so widely believed?
First: Corporations have no more authority than any collection of individuals do. Any collection of "n" individuals has "n" votes. A corporation with "n" stockholders has only "n" votes, not n+1.
You might object they can buy more legislators with bigger budgets, but this is no more true than it is of any group of individuals. Those "n" stockholders might agree to sacrifice some of their profits for a desired political outcome, but that's also true of all of the members of the ACLU by virtue of the donations they make. In neither case does the entity have any more power than the collective interest of its members.
Corporations do have a right to speech just to the extent that their individual stock holders (or board members) have a right to speech and choose to say the same thing. Compare this with the ACLU, or the Sierra club. Surely they are groups of individuals acting for common purpose expressing their collective opinion. So is Exxon. None of those groups have the status of an individual. Indeed, individuals in corporations have fewer free speech rights that individual citizens if one counts campaign censorship laws.
Corporations can not (in general) shield their employees from criminal law. Justice might not always be fair, but they surely don't have any immunity just by working for a corporation. The company itself has limited liability only to the extent of its contracts. That is, any business you do with a company is always conditioned on its future solvency. That's not granting the company any special privilege, those are just the terms of any deal you make with them (just like business transactions with individuals are always conditioned on their not declaring bankruptcy).
If a company fails to fulfill a contractual obligation, then, yes, it has the liability rather than the employee, but that's not granting it a special privilege either. Were criminal behavior involved, the employee would still be liable (e.g. Ken Lay).
Second: So why do liberals believe something so wrong? Even if it were true, it's silly because they are many more citizens than corporations. Giving Exxon a vote wouldn't change anything. The first approximation is the zero-sum fallacy: that all productivity is fixed and thus income can be redistributed without harm. From that point of view, anybody with money is evil rather than productive. Censoring their opinion is an obvious ploy. But, it seems to be something more subtle, more a case of projection, where liberals personify corporations in an effort to demonize them, and then let their own emotional conception spill over it believing it's a legal reality.
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