It probably is these days.
A while ago we passed into a dystopia where the constitution protects corporations from the imposition of the interests of the citizens.
A while ago we passed into a dystopia where the constitution protects corporations from the imposition of the interests of the citizens.
The original purpose of the constitution was to protect the interests of the people from the tyranny of the government.
And, of course, there's no reason people can't band together and pursue their interests as a group.
Well, corporations are composed of people. So far, so good.
However, publicly traded corporations are specifically designed to allow only a profit motive to be shared by the group. By design, shareholders do not have other shared interests and anyway the board and executives have a legal duty to the financial interests of the shareholders, not other shared interests. The people working at the company below the executives are constrained by them, of course.
So a corporation specifically does not share the general interests of the individuals of which it is composed, except where it comes to money (also, that interest in money tends to be in the short term).
To the extent we treat corporations as people with the protections of the constitution, the constitution now works for the (short term) financial interests of corporations.
Not the original purpose. And probably not a very good idea for society at large.
(However, with the money spigot wide open, it's very unlikely to change.)
What you want is for smaller companies to make up a larger proportion of the economy.
In fact, even in US law, corporations do not have all of the rights human persons have. They specially have the right to free speech as it pertains to political finance.
Corporations in the US still don't have the right to vote, they do not have general freedom of speech, specifically they have much weaker protections against compelled speech than people, they do not have fifth amendment protection against self incrimination, they do not have rights under the comity clause, they do not have freedom of religion, etc...
Indeed, in no country in the world do corporations have the rights of their shareholders or individual rights in general, not even in the US. In the US, corporations only have very specific rights, and judicial fiat determines which ones it has and which ones it doesn't based purely on political expediency (and indeed the courts flip and flop on which rights they do have as the political reality changes).
Why not? It seems like you should be making the argument the other way. Why is a company's owner exercising their freedom of religion through a corporation any different than their exercising it through a church building or an unincorporated gathering of people?
What's really going on here is that the government is violating these rights when it's politically expedient, using corporate personhood as a fig leaf to excuse their violations.
Notice that if you try and come up with arguments to excuse this, they'll tend to be something like "because it's a business" rather than "because it's a corporation" even though that would imply it should also apply to a sole proprietorship or general partnership where there is still a business but no limited liability. There is no apparent reason why having limited liability in particular should require the waiver of unrelated rights.
If the owner tries to use a corporation in such a way that it is merely an extension of their own person, the corporation is then subject to losing the corporate veil.
So why then, if the rights and responsibilities of the corporation are legally distinct, and the law enforces a separation of intent and personalities, should the right of the individual get through to the corporation?
The answer is that it shouldn't. The entire point of the corporation is that the rights and responsibilities of the corporation are not the rights and responsibilities of their owners. There is no reason why any right at all of the owner should percolate to the corporation.
Sole proprietorships, partnerships, and general associations do not have this separation. The rights and responsibilities are the same. So of course the rights of the owners should be available to their entity.
There is nothing arbitrary here. It's perfectly sensible, it's how every other country in the world does it, and it's how it was intended in the US as well. On the contrary, the idea that there is no such separation for some rights but there is for others is bizarre.
Because the two things have separate purposes.
In one case the corporation will commonly have multiple owners or have employees other than the owner(s), and then an owner isn't fully in control of all of the corporation's actions and so shouldn't have personal responsibility for everything it does.
In the other case the corporation wants to do something, which may not be the will of all of its owners and employees, but is the will of some of its owners or employees, who each individually have the right to it, so why shouldn't the corporation?
> Sole proprietorships, partnerships, and general associations do not have this separation. The rights and responsibilities are the same. So of course the rights of the owners should be available to their entity.
So if a landlord who doesn't bother to incorporate because the building is their only asset of consequence, or temporarily transfers the building to a natural person in the event of a problematic tenant, then as a result they should be able to challenge landlord-tenant laws on the basis of freedom of religion or freedom of association? It seems like this is just an excuse and the reason you might want these laws has nothing to do with whether the business has incorporated or not.
Well… we could upend the foundations of capitalism to make it more likely corporations would be responsible for the well-being of society and therefore make it OK to grant them personhood.
Or we could simply not grant these things (that aren’t people) personhood.
I think it’s pretty obvious which one makes more sense.
Also, think carefully. The problem isn’t that the ownership of widely-held conglomerates is too diluted. It is that *by design* the only shared interest of the owners is the profitability of the company. This isn’t some unfortunate, unforeseen happenstance. It’s on purpose and enforced by law.
Our corporate system is designed for and the efficient allocation of capital, not the creation of good citizenal entities. Let’s recognize what it is and act accordingly.
Corporations are treated like people because they're made up of and owned by people. You don't lose your right not to be subject to arbitrary fines just because you incorporated. And a lot of corporations are owned by millions of different individuals, so instead of having millions of people take the government to court, it's easier to have the corporation's officers do it on their behalf. That's all "corporations are people" really is.
One: NLRB rulings are "arbitrary" only if you somehow believe that a regulatory body, whose rulings can be appealed to an Article III court for redress, are intrinsically "arbitrary". Which is a quiet little hide-the-ball attempt at rhetoric.
Two: your fictive person provides the real people who've bought into it limited liability, which actual humans cannot avail themselves of. This is a superpower of your fictive person exists at the literal beneficience of the society that granted its charter; its bad behavior should be more readily addressed than the due process afforded to actual humans.
They're arbitrary not because of the ruling (although putting judicial functions in the executive is scarcely better than putting legislative functions there), they're arbitrary because the rule you're being fined for violating was created by the administrative agency fining you rather than Congress.
> your fictive person provides the real people who've bought into it limited liability, which actual humans cannot avail themselves of.
It's typically the actual humans who avail themselves of it. Limited liability means that if you own shares of Exxon (or the S&P 500, which has contained shares of Exxon) and then they get sued and go bankrupt, the plaintiffs don't get to take your house. It's about protecting the investors (commonly ordinary human individuals) rather than the corporation which can still be sued into bankruptcy.
It's also not obvious what one has to do with the other. So you can't sue the corporation for more than what it has, why does that mean you should be able to take their stuff under rules never passed by elected legislators?
This is a weird argument that seems to be being put about recently and it's one of the weirdest legal arguments I've ever seen. Of course rulemaking can be delegated. The rules and rulemaking body remains under oversight, the rules can be overridden by the elected body, etc.
Just a totally strange argument; delegation of authority by elected bodies to specialist subgroups is basically how government works without having 100,000 elected positions, and if your proposed solution is 'okay let's have 100,000 elected positions' you get the local government situation in which people run unopposed because nobody really gives a damn and the local coroner is the town drunk - or people just vote straight ticket.
Just weird. Seems more about destroying the system - which isn't perfect, but works - than about actually solving a problem.
The way you do it is that the specialist subgroup proposes legislation and then the generalist legislature votes on it. And maybe they defer to their proposals 95% of the time, but it means that the unelected specialists can't push through a controversial change without having it approved by the elected legislators.
Have you looked at Congress lately? It would be more like less than 1% of the time. The rest of the time there will be some group that blocks action to try to get concessions on some unrelated issue of theirs.
Rule-making cannot be devolved at the legislature's discretion?
So the legislature can't write a law that says "within bounds X, org Y has the power to manage the rules around thing Z"?
(It would work in the UK, where these powers are most often delegated to the executive via Henry VIII clauses, so this is a genuine question, not a rhetorical one).
Suppose during a lame duck session that the government passed a law delegating rulemaking authority to the Senate, so they could pass new laws without them being voted on by the House or signed by the President, right before the House and Presidency switched parties. Does it make sense for that to be allowed? If not, how is it different when it's the executive the authority is being delegated to, which isn't a part of the legislature at all?
In theory the electorate should also punish a stunt like that, but you know what modern elections are like.
Where I am, it's simple: Parliament (the legislature) is sovereign, and everyone else's power flows from theirs. That puts a hell of a lot power in Parliament's hands (eg general elections were suspended between 1935 and 1945). This is a blessing (agility) and a curse (more vulnerable to bad actors). You've got some laws that are harder to change than others, which puts some brakes on bad actors.
They can't. They control the House, not the Senate, and they'd need both in order to change it back. Or, under the new rule, at least the Senate by itself, which is the part they haven't got.
> This is a blessing (agility) and a curse (more vulnerable to bad actors).
Agility in central government is overrated. If it does nothing you can still take a crack at the problem at the state level or in the private sector, whereas if it does something bad, you're screwed.
Your dog doesn't get the protections of personhood because you own it. If it attacks someone, there's not going to be a trial.
(A moral view not a legal one, obviously. No comments about the merits or otherwise of this case).
Corporations are shielded from the vast majority of criminal penalties and essentially make truly punitive damages non-existent. This is something no person has - I can't discharge fines in bankruptcy and I can't decide that the only punishment I'll ever have are fines.
And we all know Congress is broken. It cannot possibly make the decisions currently delegated to agencies.
It would have been overturned at any point that the reps had both the legislature and the executive. 2002-2006, and 2016-2018.
All that they care about is that they've been protected from their state governments one morning, and not protected the next.
You'll quickly discover that your state also has some hard limits on that right, they are just drawn at different points than the states that you mistakenly think don't have a right to 'self-defense'. You can defend yourself anywhere, you just can't always kill people in 'self-defense' when you have other options available to you.
(Related question: Does your state have a right to body autonomy, or is it in blatant violation of the fourth amendment?)
100% correct.
> backwards religious superstition that anything growing where a baby would is assumed to be a human baby
This is absolute bullshit. I'm an Orthodox Christian, extremely conservative, particularly on abortion, and a priest's wife I know had an abortion for an ectopic pregnancy, because it was non-viable and would have killed her. It's simply a matter of believing that the unborn are human and then acting rationally based on this belief. I wish more people could get this—rather reasonable—viewpoint through their thick skulls.
Additionally, even a fetus that seemingly will be eventually viable isn't actually viable for the first few months. From a libertarian perspective, while arguments exist that the mother has consented to this responsibility for some cases, in other cases she has not (eg rape).
(Also FWIW your example of an ectopic pregnancy example doesn't actually meet the criteria of "growing where a baby would")
Because then would-be abortants would simply find a doctor who would sign the correct paperwork. Duh.
> whether the fetus even has the right number of chromosomes.
So you support eugenics?
> From a libertarian perspective, while arguments exist that the mother has consented to this responsibility for some cases, in other cases she has not (eg rape).
Abortion, if the fetus is human, violates the non-aggression principle. From a humanist perspective, it wasn't the kid's fault.
That hypothetical doctor would be breaking the law by falsifying paperwork, and could be prosecuted for that. It seems you're arguing that it's necessary for the law to overbearingly criminalize related just behavior (and in this case medically prudent behavior), because of the possibility that law breaking could be fraudulently hidden. I don't buy that sort of argument.
> So you support eugenics?
Do you have a larger point here, or is equating the acknowledgement of chromosomal abnormalities that are ultimately incompatible with life as "eugenics" just meant to be a rhetorical cheap shot?
> Abortion, if the fetus is human, violates the non-aggression principle
By the usual framing of the non-aggression principle, I don't see how. Would you say a landlord evicting a tenant violates the non-aggression principle?
Doctor/patient privacy is really really strong.
> equating the acknowledgement of chromosomal abnormalities that are ultimately incompatible with life ... a rhetorical cheap shot.
Depends if you're talking about Down's and related disorders or not.
> Would you say a landlord evicting a tenant violates the non-aggression principle?
Of course not, eviction is a possible outcome of the contract between the two parties.
HIPAA already includes exceptions for law enforcement, and the new law itself could certainly mandate some new monitoring and compliance checks. This argument just feels like doubling down on the previous unsupported rationale.
> Depends if you're talking about Down's and related disorders or not.
Since you're defending blanket bans, then it's sufficient to make my point on the most extreme least compatible with life conditions. Like say from a quick look, trisomy 8. "Warkany syndrome (trisomy 8) is a common cause of miscarriage and, for newborns who survive, death usually occurs within the first months". Or trisomy 16. "Full trisomy 16 is incompatible with life. While most fetuses are spontaneously aborted by the 12th week of pregnancy, a few have survived into the second trimester". But in general I don't think knowingly bringing a child with Down's syndrome into the world is kind, compassionate, or worthwhile either.
> Of course not, eviction is a possible outcome of the contract between the two parties.
That only works for tenants over 18 who've signed the lease contract, and not for say their minor children or subletees. But sure, getting the contract out of the picture entirely - would you say that a landlord evicting a squatter violates the non-aggression principle?
Can I move over to your state, and just take a blood transfusion, or an organ from you? I will die without a kidney, and surely you can spare one... My body autonomy is more important than yours, after all, I should be able to make such an imposition on you. My life for a minor inconvenience for you.
If a zygote can make this imposition on a woman, why should you have any right to refuse me on this?
There's probably an argument to be made from a natural rights framing that the right to self defense is still applicable to unjustifiable but duly authorized state violence, like say the war on drug users. Though I don't know how this could be applied practically. Perhaps limiting the number of cops that can carry out any arrest, such that there's an actual balance of power?
Do these verdicts also happen for the least sympathetic cases, like an actual criminal defending themselves against an unknowable no-knock "warrant" ? Because if you're the basic upstanding sympathetic right-looking type, it's actually most places you will not be charged for defending yourself in your home against non-police.
And has this all happened regularly enough to form a predictable pattern such that the police have actually curtailed such attacks? Affecting repeated interactions such that one doesn't need to continually dwell on the basic dynamic is the hallmark of an intact right.
Because I haven't heard of any states that are shining examples of police accountability, especially states that people tend to market as promoting the right to self defense. But I'd love to be wrong!
Nonsense and worse words. They aren't originalists, they don't care about the executive/legislative distinction. It's embarrassing farce to pretend that there is constitutional principle behind achieving their desired political goals. Roe would've been gutted were it law and the general incoherence of Alito and Thomas would have led the way.
The real problem is that a lot of people want there to be a right to abortion in the constitution but they don't have enough votes to actually put it there, and they also don't want to read the constitution's general constraints on government power to be restrictive enough to limit this using coherent logic because that would also limit the government from doing many other things they want it to do.
Also, the current court absolutely has an originalist majority, even if you happen to disagree with the originals. The Constitution is a very restrictive document for the Federal Government.
The student debt case: perfectly clear law passed by Congress and overturned by SCOTUS in very tenuous grounds with a plaintiff that never even had proper standing.
There is a law. It authorized the education dept to “waive or modify” loan provisions. But somehow the court ruled that that means only minor changes are permitted. Obviously this isn’t what Congress intended - waiving entire provisions could of course result in major changes.
The entire “major questions” doctrine is a farce. It’s not in a law. It’s not in the Constitution. It’s an invention of the court.
And again: the case never should have been heard. The litigant had no standing.
The motivation here is SCOTUS striking down a policy they don’t like.
Conservatives don't really like the federal Department of Education, but there is no question that Congress passed a law creating it. Why do you think they would strike down this but not that?
> There is a law. It authorized the education dept to “waive or modify” loan provisions. But somehow the court ruled that that means only minor changes are permitted. Obviously this isn’t what Congress intended - waiving entire provisions could of course result in major changes.
Under that reading they could waive the entire law and forgive everybody's loans, making any other provisions moot. If that's what Congress wanted then why would they pass a law allowing them to "waive or modify" loan provisions, implying that they contemplated the continued existence of loans, rather than just passing a loan forgiveness bill to begin with?
> The entire “major questions” doctrine is a farce. It’s not in a law. It’s not in the Constitution. It’s an invention of the court.
The Court interprets the law. The "major questions" doctrine announces how they intend to interpret the laws Congress passes. It was already a thing when the bill in question was passed. Congress therefore knew that if they intended the law to grant the power to do something like that, they would have to spell it out explicitly, and then they didn't, implying that wasn't what they intended.
Also, just think about it. If that bill had the words "including the power to forgive all student loans" appended to the bottom, do you think it would have passed? If not, it's because those words would have changed the expected consequence of the law, right?
At the risk of a cliché, Biden's student debt forgiveness strategy was dangerous to democracy.
If you are concerned about the rule of law you should be upset that the Supreme Court even heard a case so obviously lacking standing. Nobody was harmed by this policy so conservative groups had to invent a fictional harm just to get the case heard.
If nobody is harmed then why do you suppose anyone wanted to prevent it? Why don't we just continuously forgive all debts of any kind?
The party allegedly harmed, MOHELA, didn’t think they were harmed and didn’t want to participate in the case. The court let the state of Missouri stand in for them even though it’s even harder to see how they have standing.
You tell me: who is harmed by students owing less is student loans?
All of the union's money comes from the workers. If they wanted to they could form a PAC regardless of whether they form a union. Which might even do them more good because then the PAC would be directly representing the workers instead of having an indirect layer of union leadership with potentially different incentives.
Until we figure something out, the current structure is better than zero protections for workers.
Email? Text messages? However they want. How does anybody communicate about anything?
> Would a less educated blue collar worker ever fund a PAC?
They would do it if they thought it was a good idea.
> How do you convince them it’s for their own benefit?
How do you convince them that paying union dues is for their own benefit?
> Will you do it again for a different agenda?
People can do whatever they want.
> Until we figure something out, the current structure is better than zero protections for workers.
Most workers aren't in a union. You're proposing a change one way or another.
Just think about it from an energy use standpoint. The average citizen has very little energy they dedicate to community and social system support. This includes education, voting, lobbying etc…
This is a basic requirement for an electorate to self govern, everyone has to give input and that input should align with their well considered interests. The amount of work that takes is relatively immense for the amount of impact that people feel they have as a result.
On the other hand you have in effect every for profit entity putting as much possible energy into rent seek and increase margins for the majority owners by offloading any possible externalities of inequitable ownership or resource hoarding.
Corporate lobbies have perfectly captured the political process to the extent that nobody even questions it anymore. Including legislators.
https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/what-we-do/decide-cases
You do see a judge, and you can have that trial by jury.