4 ms·
I really wish people would stop repeating this line thinking they are making some kind of interesting point. Go watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
by harryh 6y ago
I really wish people would stop repeating this line thinking they are making some kind of interesting point. Go watch the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=St1wSWtm_BI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=St1wSWtm_BI
Romney's point was that corporations are made up of people and that corporate taxes are, in the end, taxes on people.
The fact that this was treated as some kind of gaffe at the time, and is still being repeated almost a decade later is just terribly disappointing.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago> The fact that this was treated as some kind of gaffe at the time, and is still being repeated almost a decade later is just terribly disappointing Anti-intellectualism has been a staple of American politics since approximately the 60s.
- dtech 6y ago"Corporations are people" is literally in US law [1]. It has nothing to do with a gaffe from Mitt Romney. Very famously the US supreme court ruled in 2010 that corporations have free speech and money is speech [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood#Legislation_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood#Legislati... [2] https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122805666 https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122805...
- LordDragonfang 6y ago>Very famously the US supreme court ruled in 2010 that corporations have free speech and money is speech Not quite. They ruled that that corporations can spend unlimited money because money is is speech, which was an established precedent set by the much earlier Buckley v. Valeo: >The majority ruled that the Freedom of the Press clause of the First Amendment protects associations of individuals in addition to individual speakers, and further that the First Amendment does not allow prohibitions of speech based on the identity of the speaker. Corporations, as associations of individuals, therefore have free speech rights under the First Amendment. Because spending money is essential to disseminating speech, as established in Buckley v. Valeo, limiting a corporation's ability to spend money is unconstitutional because it limits the ability of its members to associate effectively and to speak on political issues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC#Opinion_of_the_Court https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC#Opinion...
- harryh 6y ago1) The "my friend" at the end of OPs comment is the connection to Mitt Romney. It's a relatively famous quote, much to my dismay. 2) No corporations are not people. That is, quite obviously, a non-sequitur. They do, however, have some (but not all!) of the rights that people do because of the fact that they are made up of people.