Yes. While I understand the point of view of the article, I can also see a corporation just as a group of persons acting in concert. Each one of these persons has natural rights, so why can't they exercise these rights in concert?
Corporations have separate rights and responsibilities from the people that own them.
No, but you can sue it and rule against it. Ever seen a ruling with a name like "Smith vs. Acme Inc."?
> Because corporations aren't people.
No, and corporations also can't speak. So free speech for corporations is an oxymoron if you don't mean free speech by the people that make up a corporation.
Its about money spent on speech. Free speech that you can't spend money on, isn't free speech. If a news paper was told that it was welcome to print a specific story, except you can't spend money on ink for it, it'd still be censorship.
> spend its money on political candidates, with a clear expectation of a positive ROI. How can that possible be legal
It's not, that's corruption. What you're referring to is rent-seeking, and it's been around as long as politics itself. The best solution is to give politicians less power, simply because there's less rent to seek.
Not in a criminal court.
> No, and corporations also can't speak. So free speech for corporations is an oxymoron if you don't mean free speech by the people that make up a corporation.
The board of directors, actually, or, even more accurately, whoever holds a controlling share of the corporation.
Because a corporation isn't a person, and can't commit felonies. If it could, it'd be tried in criminal court.
> The board of directors, actually, or, even more accurately, whoever holds a controlling share of the corporation.
Yes, they have free speech, just as any minority shareholder as well and managers and all employees. The latter just don't have the same access to spend company resources on said speech.
And yet they should be granted all the rights of a person?
> Yes, they have free speech, just as any minority shareholder as well and managers and all employees. The latter just don't have the same access to spend company resources on said speech.
Any access to spend company resources. If you don't have a controlling interest, you can do just about jack and shit. I suppose you could embezzle or misuse funds though.
You're also wrong about the draft bit: while the mechanism is different, private companies have found themselves taken over by the Federal government during e.g. WWII ... or at least the credible threat was made (most recently I read such a case WRT to the Manhattan Project, that threat was required to light a fire under one company that supplied them).