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Corporations are groups of people acting together | 393 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
A convenient legal fiction
Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, May 26 2012 @ 03:33 AM EDT
"I'll accept that corporations are people when Texas executes one"

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Corporations are groups of people acting together
Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, May 26 2012 @ 09:16 AM EDT

A Corporation is technically a group of people (the owners to be specific) acting together as one, with some legal rules to limit liability overflowing between the individual people and corporate identity (in both directions).

Thus corporations should be subject to any quantitative limits on its owners, with no double-dipping allowed. Thus if one human owner is limited to one vote, his corporation cannot cast an extra vote in addition to the one cast by the owner. If the owner is not allowed to delegate his vote to his lawyer, he is not allowed to delegate it to the employees of his corporation either. If one human owner is limited to contributing $X to a political campaign, he cannot increase that amount by going through his corporation, and a multi-owner corporation will need to clear its campaign spending with each owner to ensure they don't use contribution rights already used or delegated to a sister corporation.

There is also a legal argument to be made about the degree to which corporate officers are empowered to act on behalf of the owners in matters not usually the domain of that specific corporation, and if unanimity among owners is needed to increase that delegation of powers from the owners. For instance if I own a company that repairs cars, I may not want the petrol head that I hired to run it to make political statements on my behalf, as he might belong to a different party than me. Ditto if I own a 0.0000001% stake in a big car factory and don't politically agree with the professional company execs. Situation would be very different if I owned a company type that makes political statements as a business, such as a newspaper or an advertising agency specializing in political campaigns, in which case they would probably not be empowered to tamper with cars on my behalf.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

A convenient legal fiction
Authored by: tknarr on Saturday, May 26 2012 @ 11:59 PM EDT

My reaction to the ruling was "I don't see any limitation on political speech. The people involved aren't subject to any limitation. If the CEO of the company personally wants to spend $X millions of dollars supporting a candidate, the rules on corporate spending don't stop him. Ditto the individual shareholders, and the individual employees. So how does limiting the corporation's ability to spend money limit the right to free speech of the people involved? All it limits is their right to use other people's money to support their speech, and I don't recall that being a protected right.".

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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