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> As an American this is what I truly hate about corporations. They are afforded person-hood and "citizenship" where it benefits them but are treated as a compa

> As an American this is what I truly hate about corporations. They are afforded person-hood and "citizenship" where it benefits them but are treated as a company / corporation / non-living entity when that benefits them most. As an American, I detest this meme, because it perpetuates major misconceptions about corporate law in the US. Corporations are not granted "personhood and citizenship". People are citizens. People can exercise their rights. Both of those statements are true whether they do so as individuals or whether they do so as a group. In other words, a group of people has the same legal rights collectively that they do as individuals. This concept is often abbreviated as "corporate personhood", which is unfortunate because it's a seriously misleading term. It's not that corporations become people - it's a way of referring to way individuals can exercise their rights through a group. Corporate personhood isn't even a single provision; it's a way of summarizing a collection of unrelated case law in a short phrase.

ejstronge 9y ago
I'm not very knowledgeable in this area, but have a question, as you seem to have thought about this. I feel the GP's point relates to things like corporations receiving favorable tax treatment when individuals would not; corporations receiving very lenient punishments for crimes when individuals would not; corporations, as above, being able to avoid payments when an individual's property might otherwise be at risk, and so on. Perhaps I'm just not aware that these possibilities are available to me. Am I mistaken here? Overall, I feel your response deals with the legal framework around what GP said as opposed to the ideas that inspired GP's comment.
sooheon 9y ago
>People are citizens. People can exercise their rights. Both of those statements are true whether they do so as individuals or whether they do so as a group. In other words, a group of people has the same legal rights collectively that they do as individuals. I in turn detest this meme. It is symptomatic of everything I think is wrong with corporatism. Size and power distort incentives and moral accountability. Each individual in a group should continue to have the rights they have as individuals, but these rights should not aggregate with a "simple sum", so to speak. There must be some cost to aggregating your "rights" in this way, because there is a clear dampening factor for aggregate blame and accountability, which counterbalance "rights". People behave differently in groups (worse), and with more power (worse), and it is impossible to pin moral blame on a corporation. People perpetrate violence on other people. People can perpetrate said violence as a group. People and groups with more means (money, power, influence) can perpetrate and get away with more violence, as the scale and degrees of removal from the effects of the violence become incomprehensible. Hence I can't blow smoke in the face of my neighbor because I will feel bad, and I will have to deal with the repercussions. But BP can spill 4.9 million gallons of oil in the gulf because not a single person will go to jail, the fees are a negligible cost of doing business, and nobody feels bad because everyone was "just doing their job". No, I don't believe corporations deserve any rights whatsoever.
- chimeracoder 9y ago
  > because there is a clear dampening factor for aggregate blame and accountability There isn't, legally. If anything, corporate status provides a clearer framework for holding people properly accountable when they coordinate their actions as a group. Without corporate case law, it would be much easier to shirk accountability. > But BP can spill 4.9 million gallons of oil in the gulf because not a single person will go to jail, the fees are a negligible cost of doing business, and nobody feels bad because everyone was "just doing their job" You're conflating a lot of distinct issues - principally, the effects of being a corporation and the effects of being incredibly wealthy and politically influential. > No, I don't believe corporations deserve any rights whatsoever. This statement is logically equivalent to "I don't believe that people should have any rights to coordinate their actions". The irony is that it sounds like a populist statement that's sticking up for the little guy against the machine, but in actuality it's an incredibly radical statement in favor of stripping power away from the poor in order to preserve the power and status of the extremely wealthy.
  - sooheon 9y ago
    > Without corporate case law, it would be much easier to shirk accountability. To my eyes, a large part of the purpose of corporations is to shirk individual responsibility. What else would LLC stand for? >You're conflating a lot of distinct issues - principally, the effects of being a corporation and the effects of being incredibly wealthy and politically influential. I attempted to make it clear that the act of incorporating, ceasing to become merely an individual and existing as part of a group in and of itself has dehumanizing influences. The corrupting influence of group-think, moral smokescreening, and increased degrees of separation from the repercussions of one's actions is orthogonal to the corrupting influence of power. Nazi guards could sleep at night after a long day of executions because they were part of a corrupt group that absolved them of responsibility, not because they were mega rich. To take BP's example, the blame for the spill results from countless decisions which add up to supreme negligence. But it's hard to pin on a single person, it is the organization itself (and its goals) which caused the problem. This negative influence needs to be curtailed, so I think it's inappropriate to consider a group of individuals as having the exact same rights as its constituents summed. When it comes to rights, I just don't buy that 2+2=4. >>No, I don't believe corporations deserve any rights whatsoever. >This statement is logically equivalent to "I don't believe that people should have any rights to coordinate their actions" It was a bit inflammatory of me to word it that way, but I still disagree that those two things are "logically equivalent". I just don't think it makes sense to think of rights in aggregate. Aggregating rights in the form of corporations leads to weighting of rights by the amount of money you have. The son of the chairman of Samsung can exert far more influence across his network of conglomerates and paper companies than I ever can. Does his million-fold monetary advantage over me give him a million times more rights across his corporate appendages than me? Should I buy a third of a share in his textiles company which has the president's ear if I want to express my rights? Fuck that. Those aren't rights, it's the pure expression of power and violence, the very thing I want society to curtail.
burntrelish1273 9y ago
Strawman. You clearly aren't awake to the corporate cancer that has metastasized through corrupt political-media-corporate complex that controls America with manufactured libertarian propaganda and consent.
blusterXY 9y ago
The problem is that companies can spend their money on free speech without undergoing double-taxation. If the same money was allocated to an individual first it would be taxed.
spease 9y ago
The issue with this perspective is that corporations generally are not chartered such that they provide their employees with a voice in its executive actions. There’s also a level of (soft) coercion in that employees’ jobs are on the line. As a result, granting a corporation blanket rights (eg to donate money) is not implicitly granting those rights to the group, it is granting them only to a small number of individuals within that group. You say “individuals can exercise their rights through a group”. Most individuals are in fact prohibited from exercising their rights during working hours beyond what is of interest to the corporation, and do not have a direct voice in what the corporation’s goals are. Thus mediating privileges of a 10,000-person organization as if it speaks with the voice of 10,000 people is effectively reassigning the voice of a large chunk of people to a much smaller chunk of people. If the group only has the legal rights collectively as the sum of its individuals, it is creating an inherently non-democratic power block within a democratic society.

ejstronge 9y ago

I'm not very knowledgeable in this area, but have a question, as you seem to have thought about this. I feel the GP's point relates to things like corporations receiving favorable tax treatment when individuals would not; corporations receiving very lenient punishments for crimes when individuals would not; corporations, as above, being able to avoid payments when an individual's property might otherwise be at risk, and so on. Perhaps I'm just not aware that these possibilities are available to me. Am I mistaken here? Overall, I feel your response deals with the legal framework around what GP said as opposed to the ideas that inspired GP's comment.

sooheon 9y ago

>People are citizens. People can exercise their rights. Both of those statements are true whether they do so as individuals or whether they do so as a group. In other words, a group of people has the same legal rights collectively that they do as individuals. I in turn detest this meme. It is symptomatic of everything I think is wrong with corporatism. Size and power distort incentives and moral accountability. Each individual in a group should continue to have the rights they have as individuals, but these rights should not aggregate with a "simple sum", so to speak. There must be some cost to aggregating your "rights" in this way, because there is a clear dampening factor for aggregate blame and accountability, which counterbalance "rights". People behave differently in groups (worse), and with more power (worse), and it is impossible to pin moral blame on a corporation. People perpetrate violence on other people. People can perpetrate said violence as a group. People and groups with more means (money, power, influence) can perpetrate and get away with more violence, as the scale and degrees of removal from the effects of the violence become incomprehensible. Hence I can't blow smoke in the face of my neighbor because I will feel bad, and I will have to deal with the repercussions. But BP can spill 4.9 million gallons of oil in the gulf because not a single person will go to jail, the fees are a negligible cost of doing business, and nobody feels bad because everyone was "just doing their job". No, I don't believe corporations deserve any rights whatsoever.

chimeracoder 9y ago
> because there is a clear dampening factor for aggregate blame and accountability There isn't, legally. If anything, corporate status provides a clearer framework for holding people properly accountable when they coordinate their actions as a group. Without corporate case law, it would be much easier to shirk accountability. > But BP can spill 4.9 million gallons of oil in the gulf because not a single person will go to jail, the fees are a negligible cost of doing business, and nobody feels bad because everyone was "just doing their job" You're conflating a lot of distinct issues - principally, the effects of being a corporation and the effects of being incredibly wealthy and politically influential. > No, I don't believe corporations deserve any rights whatsoever. This statement is logically equivalent to "I don't believe that people should have any rights to coordinate their actions". The irony is that it sounds like a populist statement that's sticking up for the little guy against the machine, but in actuality it's an incredibly radical statement in favor of stripping power away from the poor in order to preserve the power and status of the extremely wealthy.
- sooheon 9y ago
  > Without corporate case law, it would be much easier to shirk accountability. To my eyes, a large part of the purpose of corporations is to shirk individual responsibility. What else would LLC stand for? >You're conflating a lot of distinct issues - principally, the effects of being a corporation and the effects of being incredibly wealthy and politically influential. I attempted to make it clear that the act of incorporating, ceasing to become merely an individual and existing as part of a group in and of itself has dehumanizing influences. The corrupting influence of group-think, moral smokescreening, and increased degrees of separation from the repercussions of one's actions is orthogonal to the corrupting influence of power. Nazi guards could sleep at night after a long day of executions because they were part of a corrupt group that absolved them of responsibility, not because they were mega rich. To take BP's example, the blame for the spill results from countless decisions which add up to supreme negligence. But it's hard to pin on a single person, it is the organization itself (and its goals) which caused the problem. This negative influence needs to be curtailed, so I think it's inappropriate to consider a group of individuals as having the exact same rights as its constituents summed. When it comes to rights, I just don't buy that 2+2=4. >>No, I don't believe corporations deserve any rights whatsoever. >This statement is logically equivalent to "I don't believe that people should have any rights to coordinate their actions" It was a bit inflammatory of me to word it that way, but I still disagree that those two things are "logically equivalent". I just don't think it makes sense to think of rights in aggregate. Aggregating rights in the form of corporations leads to weighting of rights by the amount of money you have. The son of the chairman of Samsung can exert far more influence across his network of conglomerates and paper companies than I ever can. Does his million-fold monetary advantage over me give him a million times more rights across his corporate appendages than me? Should I buy a third of a share in his textiles company which has the president's ear if I want to express my rights? Fuck that. Those aren't rights, it's the pure expression of power and violence, the very thing I want society to curtail.

burntrelish1273 9y ago

Strawman. You clearly aren't awake to the corporate cancer that has metastasized through corrupt political-media-corporate complex that controls America with manufactured libertarian propaganda and consent.

blusterXY 9y ago

The problem is that companies can spend their money on free speech without undergoing double-taxation. If the same money was allocated to an individual first it would be taxed.

spease 9y ago

The issue with this perspective is that corporations generally are not chartered such that they provide their employees with a voice in its executive actions. There’s also a level of (soft) coercion in that employees’ jobs are on the line. As a result, granting a corporation blanket rights (eg to donate money) is not implicitly granting those rights to the group, it is granting them only to a small number of individuals within that group. You say “individuals can exercise their rights through a group”. Most individuals are in fact prohibited from exercising their rights during working hours beyond what is of interest to the corporation, and do not have a direct voice in what the corporation’s goals are. Thus mediating privileges of a 10,000-person organization as if it speaks with the voice of 10,000 people is effectively reassigning the voice of a large chunk of people to a much smaller chunk of people. If the group only has the legal rights collectively as the sum of its individuals, it is creating an inherently non-democratic power block within a democratic society.