Jesus Christ. Only on Hacker News can one find a criticism of corporate personhood in which the complaint is that it doesn't grant corporations enough rights.

Jesus Christ. Only on Hacker News can one find a criticism of corporate personhood in which the complaint is that it doesn't grant corporations enough rights. Corporations don't have rights. I understand that the law says they do: I'm saying the law is wrong. Rights are an inalienable thing granted to entities that have feelings, needs, the ability to experience joy and suffering, etc. You know what a person is: don't embarrass yourself by pretending you don't. The entire purpose of capitalism is that it's supposed to result in the best results for people. Supposedly, competition will bring us the best products possible at the lowest price possible, while fairly rewarding people for their contributions. The entire point of this is to serve people: real, human people. Corporations exist to serve people, and if they fail to serve that purpose, they don't deserve to exist. Some might argue that corporations are made up of people, and therefore corporate personhood is an approximation of representing those humans' rights, but that's a horribly inaccurate approximation of the truth. The majority of the people--real humans with rights--who make up most corporations, are workers, who are granted no power to speak on behalf of the corporation or choose what the corporation does. This means that when you treat the corporation as an entity with rights and responsibilities, you disproportionately concentrate the benefits of being a human in the people who are in charge of the corporation, who are then able to selfishly concentrate all the responsibilities--and punishments for not fulfilling those responsibilities--in the workers. This is why corporate personhood exists: because it allows a small segment of society to use the rights of humans to take actions while receiving none of the consequences if those actions are harmful, instead hiding behind limited liability and offloading the consequences onto workers and diverse pools of shareholders, some of whom had no visibility into the actions taken and too few shares to meaningfully make decisions. And in fact, because certain aspects of corporate personhood don't make any sense, corporations have more rights than people. Slavery isn't illegal in the US: if you commit a crime, you can be forced to work in prison for no pay. But when corporations commit crimes, they usually get fines. If an individual knowingly sold an exploding car to someone and that person died, the seller would trivially go to jail. But when Ford did this, they paid damages. And incidentally, the decision to do this was made by people--people with human responsibility to not commit murder/manslaughter--and none of these people ever went to jail, either. I'm going to say it again: corporations don't have rights. And corporations are harming people, who do have rights, on a massive scale. Whatever the law says, we have no ethical obligation to treat corporations with anything other than outright malice. As long as you don't harm any person, harming a corporation is a victimless act. And often, harming corporations helps more humans than it harms.