That all kinda falls apart when you change the rest of rules to treat corporations like people, though, which was the point of the 14th Amendment.
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.
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.