Corporations, People, Rights, and Values

Apparently corporations are people, with first-amendment rights to participate in electoral campaigns, just like anyone else. True, they are treated in some ways as people, a way to limit the liability of Boards of Directors for their actions. This is important: it's probably one of the reasons for the popularity of corporations as a way of organizing business.

But look, corporations are collections of people. They are made up of workers and shareholders, in whom the true personhood and the rights associated with it are properly lodged. One of the arguments corporations used about income taxation, if I remember my economic history correctly, is that they are actually not people themselves, because look, they belong to these people who also pay taxes, so any tax on their corporate "personal" income would be a second tax on top of the tax the actual humans behind them pay. We ended up with a system that taxed corporate income at a lower rate, and not all of it, in effect asking them to pay for the privilege of being considered people under the law.

So for some purposes, corporations are people, but for taxation, they are not. I say, the right of using money to talk in political campaigns should be like the taxation thing. The people who make up the corporations have the right to express themselves. Having the corporation do it too is double expression, just as taxing corporate income is double taxation.

Should people who own corporate shares have double expression? That doesn't square with my values. In citizenship, it should be one person, one voice. That way, I get to say what I think, and I don't have to worry about whether the corporations in which I own stock say what I think or something else. It's more efficient, and it's the right thing to do.