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Comment by polski-g | Hacker News Reader

Unconstitutional on 14th amendment grounds and first amendment grounds.

They are privileging speech rights from some groups over other groups (unions v corps).

You can (and others surely will) make that argument. But it doesn't apply because an LLC isnt a protected group. Gov'ts are fully allowed to discriminate outside of the relatively constrained race, religion, gender stuff. If the individuals in an LLC want to politic, then they are using the wrong venue. The state has created other venues and can force citizens to use them (you surely approve of this power when it forces your doctor to be board certified).

Where in the constitution does it say that corporate entities have any rights at all?

Corporations inherit their rights and privileges from the people in them. Because a corp is in fact just a series of individuals in a trenchcoat. (This would make immediate sense if we had not let grammar decay and you implicitly knew corp = plural)

Those people did not lose their individual rights; they are still free to donate using their money. Corporations are not people even if they are made up of people.

The people making up the corporation can all vote as individuals and the corporation itself has no vote. This is no different.

people are corporations. I hardly exist as an individual in america. I do not own anything, my company does (my company employs only me and soon my daughter when she is of age), I do not buy anything, my company does. I don’t have phone service or internet service or practically anything under my name. and my company (me) has about the same rights as you, an individual, except of course a lot more cause capitalism be capilizing :)

Not necessarily. Unions are typically organized as a not-for-profit. The legislation acts on all entities including unions.

Repeat after me: Corporations and LLCs are not individuals. Corporations and LLCs are government creations. Corporations and LLCs do not have natural rights.

>Repeat after me: Corporations and LLCs are not individuals. Corporations and LLCs are government creations.

They are however, groups of individuals.

I know that's part of the Supreme Council's current justification for why corpos deserve natural rights, but I don't really see what it actually has to do with anything. Regardless of how corpos might be regulated, the individuals associated with a corpo are all still capable of exercising their free speech rights in their own individual capacity. Declaring that the government-created legal entity should not be able to direct individuals to speak a certain way fundamentally preserves those individuals' rights. The corpo's owners are also still able to freely speak on the corpo's interests using their own individual rights.

Yeah, and those individuals already have rights. I don't know why you think the group itself should have rights too on top of it.

Should we give corporations the right to vote? Should its members would have double voting rights?

Corporations, just like a group of concerned mothers pooling money for a billboard, are a grouping of people. And shareholders have rights to spend their own pooled money on speech, just like the mothers have that same right.

This is disingenuous - a group of concerned mothers does not have a government-created liability shield, for starters.

In general, shareholders are always able to pool their money directly in the manner you are stating. This being uncommon shows that the situations are not equivalent.

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