The actual grievance seems to be unrelated to the corporation itself. People just associate “corporations” with rich people, and they won’t want rich people to vote.
The actual grievance seems to be unrelated to the corporation itself. People just associate “corporations” with rich people, and they won’t want rich people to vote.
I don't think anyone would object to a rich person casting a single vote and maybe putting a bumper sticker on their car or a sign in their yard. The issue people take with the rich and politics is the outsized influence they wield in elections. The whole "one person one vote" thing falls apart when the rich can throw millions at advertisements and millions at the "charities" run by the politicians they bought.
If you're only for free speech as long as it doesn't change people's minds, we have very different perspectives.
First, the rich have unimaginably more power in changing people's minds. This isn't sitting down at a bar and having a chat with hank to try to convince him to vote on prop 99. It is the wealthy putting their opinions on your phone, television, and billboards, reminding you of it multiple times per day. If politics is truly a contest of ideas, then the playing field needs to be level so that the ideas can be evaluated fairly, rather than it simply being a contest of who can buy enough ad space to brainwash people to vote against their interests.
Second, the wealthy don't have to change people's minds. They can purchase politicians by "donating" to them, going to million-dollar-per-plate dinners hosted by them, directly giving them money by staying in their hotels, etc. You don't have to convince a politician that they should vote on prop 99, you just need to pay them however much they want for their vote.
If the wealthy had exactly as much power in politics as a fireman or nurse, then I'd be all for their participation.
If that was true everyone would love billionaires. I'm fascinated by the cluelessness of this assertion!
The actual research on campaign finance says that once you've managed to inform the voters about what you stand for and who you are, further spending does very little.
> simply being a contest of who can buy enough ad space to brainwash people to vote against their interests
This is the most anti democratic statement I've seen in a while!
If you think voters are such easily brainwashed fools, you can hardly be pro democracy!
Relative to how many of them actively campaign against our basic interests, I would say people disproportionately love billionaires.
But it would likely lead to other problems because the owner demographics are generally out of touch.
I'm pretty sure this is a fundimental design of the US system. There are things your city is allowed to do by state constitution. Things your county is allowed to do. And things only the state is allowed to do.
This is expressly to enable the people that live in that place the right to self governance.
Much of the discourse on this topic involves muddled, contradictory thinking that simultaneously argues "corporations aren't people" and "corporations are exercising autonomous agency as singular entities distinct from the people who constitute them". These two premises cannot both be true.
So while corporations aren't people, they do seem to be exercising autonomous agency as singular entities distinct from the people who constitute them. Because by definition that is what a limited liability corporation provides? It seems that this is the crux of a lot of angst?
Corporations don't function as a liability shield in the sense you're talking about. The idea that people can individually engage in criminal or tortious conduct without any direct accountability is a myth -- limited liability protects investors from financial liabilities that exceed their investment, but it in no way shields corporate managers from liability for their own criminal conduct in managing the firm.
> So while corporations aren't people, they do seem to be exercising autonomous agency as singular entities distinct from the people who constitute them. Because by definition that is what a limited liability corporation provides?
No, it does not do that in any way, shape or form. Limited liability means that creditors can't foreclose on your house to cover the debts of a firm that you own $100 of stock in. It does not shield anyone actually managing the company from civil or criminal liability for their actions.
> It seems that this is the crux of a lot of angst?
That angst is attributable to believing in misinformation pushed advanced by factions who benefit from increasing conflict and controversy in our society.
So why then does it seem that corporations do in fact shield executives from criminal charges? Is this just collusion among the well-off? Money buys verdicts?
I’m happy to take your word on limited liability as IANAL (obviously) but it sure as hell seems like executives ought to go to jail a LOT more than they do. Corporations do terrible things in the world and are seemingly never held to account.
Finally, looking to my own education, can you suggest a place to read up on this topic so I am not flatly wrong in the future? Thx in advance :)
The issues at hand seem distinct but related.
Anecdotally, most of the large corporate scandals that involved actual criminal conduct that I'm aware of did result in prosecutions and, often, convictions of the culpable parties. For example, Jeffrey Skilling, Bernie Madoff, and Elizabeth Holmes all went to jail.
You could also just look for examples of officials trying to explain why they won't bring charges against banking officials.
https://financialservices.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx...
https://www.propublica.org/article/why-havent-bankers-been-p...
https://www.npr.org/2011/07/13/137789065/why-prosecutors-don...
I should state that this reply is mostly for other people reading our comment thread, as I can think of no adult American who would present your argument in good faith.
Misinformation, propaganda, urban legends, etc.
> but it sure as hell seems like executives ought to go to jail a LOT more than they do.
Based on what? Which executives are you talking about, and what crimes do you suspect them of?
> Corporations do terrible things in the world and are seemingly never held to account.
Again, what "terrible things" are you talking about, and what level of accountability do you see lacking in the way existing police forces, regulatory agencies, and the courts respond to their behavior?
> Finally, looking to my own education, can you suggest a place to read up on this topic so I am not flatly wrong in the future?
I'd start with any basic intro-level textbook on business law.
Before you start, given the extent to which your previous comments indicate you're relying on how things feel or seem to you, I'd recommend considering the extent to which you are reading your own assumptions and emotional attachments into your perceptions of the outside world, and the extent to which you're relying on echo chambers and biased sources of information to validate your theories and assumptions.
You can act in your capacity as a person and exercise your rights, taking on personal liability.
You can act via a fictive legal proxy, which has no rights and shield yourself from some liability.
Trying to blur those two is madness.
That's not really correct. Corporations are recognized as distinct entities as a legal fiction to make application of law to them easier, but the law "pierces the corporate veil" routinely where that legal fiction is not applicable, and in those cases, recognizes the factual nature of corporations merely as methods of coordination employed by the underlying people using them.
> You can act via a fictive legal proxy, which has no rights and shield yourself from some liability.
No, this is definitely not correct. Limited liability implies that you can separate your financial accounts from that of the business, such that creditors can't target your personal assets to cover the debts of the organization, but doesn't necessarily shield you from legal liability for the actions you personally undertake in with in the context of the business.
The idea that the organization has no rights insofar as it is being regarded as an entity unto itself is also false, as a great deal of extant jurisprudence demonstrates.
"Corporations aren't people" and "corporations are singular entities unto themselves capable of exercising independent agency" are direct contradictions.
> The law doesn't seem to have any issue taking them both as true either. Corporations are considered their own entity under the law, but they do not enjoy all the rights of people
Corporations are treated as persons as a legal fiction to ensure that the methods for applying the law to their activities remains consistent and uncomplicated.
No legal framework has ever treated corporations as natural persons able to formulate their own autonomous intentions and act on those intentions unilaterally. The law is not unaware of its own abstractions.
The arguments for restricting "corporate speech" are confounding these distinct concepts together. If we are attributing rights only to natural persons, and hold that legal persons that are not natural persons do not possess rights on that account, then by the same account, we cannot attribute the power of speech to corporations, and must understand any speech that appears to originate with them as actually the product of the people who are merely using the corporation as a method of coordination.
If we are attributing the power of speech to corporations, then we must likewise recognize their right to speak freely. In fact, the first amendment explicitly protects speech itself without regard to its origin, such that any entity capable of speech must by that very fact have the right to free speech.
Corporations are an artificial entity that literally anyone can make. Even things like property ownership are somewhat artificial. Lots can generally be split and joined through a process.
This allowance of artificial entities voting seems to open a rabbit hole of secondary issues.
I think it might be more than that
Why shouldn't they?
They're trading one benefit for another.
The individual house owners don't get all the benefits of an LLC for similar reasons.
Why? What’s the logical basis for this idea that they should have to choose between these benefits?
I don't buy it at all. For example, it's generally considered to be unethical to kill a person aside from limited circumstances such as self defense. Killing a person because they're no longer useful to you is Right Out in every ethical framework I've ever heard of. Are you implying that dissolving a corporation is unethical?
Depends on each jurisdiction. You'd have to look at which frameworks informed the laws that back each corporation.
On the topic of corporate dissolution, I see less as killing and more as natural death. When a corp dissolves in accordance to its norms and general ethics (or the jurisdiction it's under, at least), that's equivalent to someone naturally dying. The constituents no longer wish to participate and follow the binding rules that define the corp to dissolve it, enacting its "will", if you will (pun intended).
Something akin to murder would be a "hostile take over into a dissolution" situation, where a rogue member decides to unilaterally dissolve the corp in defiance of the other members despite having no legal justification, neither in the binding norms of the corp nor in their personal rights (although that's generally implied, as, in theory, no contract can violate this). I think we can agree that the latter case would indeed be unethical, if not illegal.
Also, killing people strictly because they are not useful to you is covered by a "rule by might" ethics framework. Not one I agree with, but it exists.
Really this comes down to sloppy usage of words. You said the phrase yourself: "juridical people." You need that qualifier on it, "juridical," to distinguish from actual human beings. Because they're not the same. "Corporations are people" -> corporations are legal entities that share some of the same rights, privileges, and responsibilities as human beings. "Corporations aren't people" -> corporations are a distinct concept from human beings, including ethically and legally.
Legally, the argument comes down to how precise you're being. Is there an implied qualifier? Is the statement meant to convey that corporations are legally the same as natural persons (they aren't) or just that they are some sort of legal entity? And the whole dispute here is because people are interpreting it differently.
To rephrase the comment some replies above: "Because corporations aren't natural people."
All the discussion about corporate personhood is off the mark, because corporate personhood only means that corporations have some of the rights that natural persons have, and voting is not generally among them. Although apparently it is in one town in Delaware.
I think the dispute is more about interpretation. Ultimately, what I've shown is more of a perspective (one I believe it's useful due to the legal interplay of rights that happen inside), but one can just look at corporations by looking at their members, agents and the rules they've agreed prior and I suspect it would be equivalent to treating corporations as real people, presuming jusnaturalism.
Given that voting is a right currently derived from a more juspositivistic perspective, the justifications behind who's considered a "natural person" and who gets to vote are pretty arbitrary.
But that's not at all what happens. "Meta, Inc." is not just a shorthand way of naming all the shareholders of Meta, Inc. It is a separate legal entity, owned by but not identical to the shareholders.
Why do people bother making corporations in the first place? It's precisely because they want a legal entity that is not themselves. Typically this is so that, for example, the corporation's liabilities are not legally the owner's liabilities. In other words, you form an LLC so that your customers can't sue and take your house.
Your approach is IMO far too philosophical. Corporations are a totally pragmatic construct. They exist because they provide a structure that we as a society consider to be useful in order to promote commerce, innovation, and all that stuff. Nothing about that structure is set up that way because it logically follows from the rights and duties of the owners. It's set up that way because it's supposed to facilitate commerce.
LLCs, in particular, are just one type of corporation and tend to have a well defined set of laws and agreements backing them, with the primary purpose of limiting liabilities towards the owners. Personally, I'm favor of revising the way these liabilities are limited as to internalize externalities.
That being said, the corporation's liabilities not being, necessarily, the constituents' isn't inspired solely on LLC law, but also organic theory.
But, yeah, my approach is pretty philosophical because it is a "philosophy-first, pragmatism-second" one.
Corporations are not "X people". Corporations are not people, period. Natural people are just people.
Try defining what is "people". What is "natural people". Why do "natural people" have "rights". What is a "corporation". How does a "corporation" differ from any other legal fiction. So on.
Corporations are pieces of paper we've scribbled on. Because they are pieces of paper, they cannot be harmed.
This is the primary difference between corporations and people.
People can be harmed through the pieces of paper they've scribbled on. That is material. But do not mistake that for the paper being harmed. It can't be. It's just a piece of paper.
2. What is murder? Why is killing justified in certain cases (e.g. self defense, death penalties, abortions, etc.) and not in others?
3. What is the piece of paper of a corporation? What makes it different any other piece of paper? I don't think USA's agents are harming people through pieces of papers.
4. What is harm? Consider when someone puts fire into one of Meta's unoccupied buildings who gets harmed.
It might help to picture them as literally a piece of paper. It would be pretty silly to say that piece of paper has a "will of its own" or "rights" or calling it a "person", wouldn't it?
If I scribble "i am a person" on a piece of paper, it's still just a piece of paper. If I get a bunch of people to join in and scribble something on the same piece of paper, it's still just a piece of paper. There's no confusion over "rights" or "will". It's a piece of paper.
The anthropomorphization simply emerges out of a shared property in this context. Keep in mind I haven't said anything about biology.
People, of course, have rights. Corporations are not people, including "juridical people". They are legal fiction with absolutely no rights. Every action they take is permission granted to them by the people.
Even the naive perspective over this recognizes that the corporation has "rights" by being proxies of their constituents, so you are correct in saying "Every action they take is permission granted to them by the people."
However, a more careful analysis recognizes that the exercised rights of a corp comes from a combination of the rights of its members, often in intermingled way (due to binding norms of the corp) that doesn't map directly into a singular individual. As such, it's common to abstract it as the "rights of the corporation". You can look at the individual rights (sometimes you have to), but that's like looking at humans by their individual cells. Certainly doable, but cumbersome most of the time.
Also, I find the phrase "They are legal fiction with absolutely no rights" funny. As if rights weren't legal fiction themselves. Not that this means much either, ethics and law are about "what ought to be done", and that's - objectively - as fictional as you can get.
> being proxies of their constituents
These proxies have no rights. People can exercise their rights as people. Or, they can create legal fictions with no rights. That legal fiction inherits no rights from the owners, which is where the analogy fails. There's no intermingling/combination/whatever to call "rights", because there's nothing.
Every action that legal fiction takes is a permission granted to it by society that continues to tolerate its existence. That tolerance is finite. When that tolerance ends, so does the legal fiction's existence. Unlike with people, there are no moral quandaries with revoking the privilege of existence.
Rights being inherent to people is an interesting but separate topic. We've generally agreed as a society that people have rights.
> People can exercise their rights as people. Or, they can create legal fictions with no rights.
How exactly do you think they can create these legal fictions? Through their rights. That's how corporations inherit them. Keep in mind I'm not focusing on LLCs, but the more broader concept, that also includes an organized society under a common set of rules.
> There's no intermingling/combination/whatever to call "rights", because there's nothing.
There's clearly something, as "Microsoft" and "Google" are distinct entities. To imply there's nothing is to imply there's no difference.
> Every action that legal fiction takes is a permission granted to it by society that continues to tolerate its existence.
Who is "society" here? Everyone? Clearly not, or else this trial would not have reached this conclusion while others complain in the internet about its results. Generally, it refers to a group of people bound by a set of rules (the constituion, laws, etc.), i.e. a corporation. So it's a bit funny that a legal fiction decides whether other legal fictions exist.
> Rights being inherent to people is an interesting but separate topic.
We are in a discussion about whether corporations have rights or not. It ultimately will touch on the source of rights and where they are derived from.
> We've generally agreed as a society that people have rights.
Which doesn't do much against rights being legal fiction. Or corporations having rights.
I have the legal right as a person to write on a piece of paper "i am a person". That piece of paper does not inherit any rights by my doing so.
Me writing "Microsoft" on one paper and "Google" on another paper certainly means that those two pieces of paper are distinct. Neither one, however, has rights.
What I meant by intermingling/combination/whatever is that, there are no rights to inherit, because a piece of paper has no rights, inherited or otherwise. That includes intermingled rights of people. People may have complex intermingled rights on certain subjects. That is not applicable to legal fictions, because they don't have rights and can't inherit rights.
I think it will become clear as you picture the silly idea of writing "I'm a piece of paper and I have rights" and then expecting that to mean anything. Work backwards from there.
There's, objectively, an intermingling of rights happening inside an corporation, which derives directly from the "under a normative instrument" part of the definition of a corporation, which creates legal interactions between the rights of the members. That's simply a fact.
And, again, may I remind you, "rights", "laws", "norms", etc. are legal fiction. They don't have an actual corporeal body. Arguably, corporations have more of one given that they have agents, and the actions they do, on behalf of the corporation, is very material.
No, it's just a piece of paper.
Yes, rights/laws/norms/etc are legal fiction. Harm is material. Without harm, there's not much purpose to a legal system. A bad legal system lets someone harm someone else, and then wave around a piece of paper saying "Oh, it was this piece of paper that did it, not me, I'm not responsible!"
A good legal system recognizes that that's absurd. We currently play along far too much, and Citizens United was a breaking point for many people.
Even in our broken legal system, we recognize this fact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piercing_the_corporate_veil
Also, mentioning in the "Citizens United v. FEC" case along with "Piercing the corporate veil" concept is a bit funny, because if you pierce the corporate veil of Citizens United in that court case, and look at it as "the shareholders behind Citizens United v. FEC", you will actually strengthen the majority opinion of the Court.
Honestly, I don't think it's me who has a broken world view, but you. I keep two perspectives in regards to corporations: an individualistic one (which backs the "pierce the corporate veil") and a organic one, inspired by system theory and emergent properties, and I try to not mix them without appropriate care. On the other hand, you seem to hold grievances that are only related, but not directly connected, to corporate personhood. In particular, no offense, your perspective about the law seems rather reductive.
Exactly! They could do that, so the law shouldn’t treat the two situations differently. You just proved my point, not yours.
> There is some reason they don't do this
I’m sure they have many reasons. But that doesn’t change the fact that the corporation is a proxy for people.
Your real argument seems to be that you think people should have to choose between exercising their rights and having the protections of the corporate form.
Obviously, the court has ruled that they do in fact act that way. But we're talking about what should be, not what is.
The question of whether corporate owners of residences should be able to vote in this town is not at all obvious, certainly doesn't merit dismissal with a glib "corporations are just proxies." They aren't just proxies. In some respects they are, in others they aren't. If they were nothing but proxies then there'd be no point to them.
Not the original author, but generically, there are a few reasons why one would place a residential property in a distinct legal entity.
Most commonly it's to shield a property against others - spouses, children or other relatives with legal inheritance claims, especially if the jurisdiction in question treats corporate ownership more favorably to the goal of the person in question than they treat real estate ownership. In some cases, cough Rene Benko, the aim is to have a corporate veil against the government or creditors, although more commonly a trust is the chosen vehicle instead of a corporation.
The other way around is rare, but also works - the legal entity caps your exposure. Think of, say, your house catches fire due to shoddy electrical works. Some dumbass neighbor kid climbs over a fence, drowns in your pool and is barely rescued in time, but their brain is now fried for good and the kid will need 80 years in intensive assisted living. You own your home outright? All of your other wealth can be seized now to make the neighbors whole. However, if a LLC owns that home, your exposure is now limited to the value of the home - the LLC goes bankrupt, the house is sold off with the proceeds going to the neighbors, you can keep the rest of your wealth.
It simply sets a high standard for proving defamation claims by public figures.
New York Times Co. v. Sullivan - and the First Amendment it draws upon - applies to everyone, regardless of what corporation they may or may not work for. An unemployed person is protected from defamation claims by public figures under it just fine.
It does not establish any special corporate rights.
That's some really tortured logic.
Such an act would simply be a violation of the First Amendment (and Article I, for that matter). The corporate nature of its target is, again, entirely irrelevant.
Sullivan sets a high standard for defamation claims by public figures. That's it. They protect you saying defamatory things about Hillary Clinton as long as you don't write down "I know this is false and I'm defaming her because I hate her guts" explicitly somewhere.
Why? In New York Times v. Sullivan, the corporation was being sued for what it did. The New York Times reporter didn’t print and distribute all those newspapers. The corporation did that.
And what you’re calling “tortured logic” was in fact the government’s argument in Citizens United. It argued that it wasn’t regulating the filmmaker. It was regulating the corporation spending funds to make and distribute the film. So it sounds like we agree Citizens United was correctly decided!
And its status as a corporation was irrelevant to the result. If it was @ceejayoz v. Sullivan, the ruling would've been the same.
> So it sounds like we agree Citizens United was correctly decided!
There's that torturing again. I believe CU illegitimately impacts the voting rights of American citizens.
... and you can probably come up with a legal way to permanently bind a corporation to vote according to specific rules.
... and larger corporations have totally inhuman internal decision making processes that frequently arrive at conclusions no human would reach.
Corporations aren't people and don't have rights or votes.
If you want to have a say in the way a place is run, you can do so in your capacity as a person.
If you want to do so from a legal fiction "proxy", fuck off.