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Comment by MichaelCrawford | Hacker News Reader

I understand that Rand Paul is heavily into the "rights" of corporations. Is that actually true?

I personally am rather more worried about corporate surveillance than NSA surveillance. That's why I pay cash for everything, and take pains to blackhole web analytics servers with my hosts file.

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Presumably Rand Paul, like many Republicans (and no small number of Democrats), accepts the idea that people can exercise their rights through government-registered entities which they own, called "corporations". These are entities without intrinsic rights, but a well-known intellectual framework called "corporate personhood" which dates back to some of our earliest jurisprudence in this nation says that you treat them like they do, because it is a good way to reason about their owners' use of their personal rights. (This theory also makes it trivially obvious why corporate "personhood" doesn't mean corporations get to do things like vote or get married -- using a corporation is not a way that to exercise that sort of right.) </factual description>

<opinion> One may, of course, disagree that this is sound policy, but this opinion seems to be all-too-often presented in a manner which deliberately misunderstands / misrepresents the theory, perhaps in order to strengthen the invective language advocating against these policies. (Be sure to keep an eye on that, at least for the sake of your own intellectual honesty.)

My issue with this situation is that these corporations generally have orders-of-magnitude louder megaphones through which to exercise these rights. It really skews the one-person-one-vote ideal this democracy is built on. (Yes, individuals exercising an out-sized influence through money and access is a part of the same issue.) This is why things like Citizen's United and Super-PACs are so horribly distorting the functional workings of our country.

We've always had and will always have private citizens who have orders-of-magnitude-louder megaphones: big-money bogeymen like Rupert Murdoch could be plenty effective at buying megaphones. Or think of any celebrity Twitter account, from Taylor Swift to Obama himself. And we'd disempower a variety of political activity (ostensibly) backed by the common man if private-sector labor unions couldn't spend money on politics and rich CEOs could.

Corporations are just individuals who pool their resources for a common endeavor. Usually this is for profit but sometimes it is a charity. Either way, why should individuals lose rights when they operate as a group? Preventing people from pooling resources shifts the balance of power towards rich individuals who don't need extra outside resources to further their political goals.

While not debating the facts of your statement, I would contend that the only legitimate exercise of an owner's rights in the context of a corporation are to seek profit through commerce. Political speech, religious beliefs, and other "personhood" concepts are already granted to corporate owners as individuals.

> I would contend that the only legitimate exercise of an owner's rights in the context of a corporation are to seek profit through commerce.

Not all extant corporations are made to seek profits. There are nonprofits out there for a variety of charitable causes, social-justice causes, and other activities which often have a nontrivial component to them. I believe the ACLU is a corporation, for instance -- the EFF as well, and Amnesty International. We've seen many of their free-speech activities on this site. What provision shall we make for these activities and organizations in an alternative legal framework?

More generally: if an arbitrary profit-seeking corporation doesn't have first-amendment rights, why do newspapers specifically have them? (Or are we abandoning freedom of the press as well? That'll take some Constitutional doing, naturally.) Assuming that it remains, why should Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation or Bloomberg's Bloomberg have rights that Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway doesn't? And where and how should we go about drawing a line between "press" and "not press" organizations in a complicated world where, for instance, an Internet-technology firm like AOL has bought a major news entity, Time Warner?

Outside speech questions specifically, if a corporation does not have first-amendment protection to speak as it chooses, does this mean the government ought to be legally compel its choice of speech? (e.g. endorsing specific politicians, policies, etc.) Is it protected from search and seizures by the Fourth Amendment? (Or, hell, from quartering troops by the third?)

These questions may or may not have good answers. Either way, these narrow margins can hardly contain a proper treatment of the matter. I'm just throwing a few monkey wrenches into the problem, as your comment was simple and straightforward, but the consequences of the proposed legal regime are complex and wide-reaching. :P

Corporations are not as worrisome as government because their power to act on that data is less. No company in america is going to bust down my door with rifles or throw me in prison because I think things they don't like. The worst they can do (assuming the government doesn't totally break down) is refuse to do business with me. But the government can do a lot worse and have a history of doing a lot worse.

No, but corporations can lean on the government to do that on their behalf. Such as forcibly evicting a tenant from a foreclosed home [1] or confiscating equipment from a journalist who wrote about your unreleased products [2].

[1]: http://stlouis.cbslocal.com/2012/10/15/florissant-police-arr... [2]: http://gizmodo.com/5524843/police-seize-jason-chens-computer...

Agreed. If the corps use the government to do their bidding that is bad. In the case of this candidate I think the pitch is that he won't allow that either (or at least that' me general understanding of the libertarian position).

I agree that the government can do a lot worse and that governments certain have in the past. That said, the more comfortable the relationship between government and a corporation the more likely one is to benefit from the resources and pull of the other.

A corporation won't bust down your door when they can just have LE do it on their behalf. The iPhone 4 leak comes to mind... http://www.fastcompany.com/1628188/police-raid-gizmodo-edito...

Psychic terror, working against you ever getting a job again if you don't "behave", colluding to make sure you are held down (e.g. your wage, benefits, whatever) .. and so on. People who think that physical violence - the one the government reserves for itself - is the worst form of violence live a very sheltered life. I envy them.

Help me understand this better. It seems like being blacklisted by a big company or even entire industry is bad, even life altering. But people get serious PTSD or sometimes even die from one single 5-minute fight with a cop.

Furthermore, I think shunning and blacklisting should be a protected form of individual choice. For example, I'm just not going to hang out with someone that's a racist. That is and should be 100% my choice. But I don't have a right to physically harm them. I'll argue that this arrangement of making violence special and different from harsh-words or shunning will make for a more functional society because we don't always all have to agree but we can still live in one place together.

I agree if we're talking about a conglomerate, but how many individual corporations can coerce other corporations into handing over information?

take pains to blackhole web analytics servers with my hosts file

There are many projects online that do that for you. All you need to do( just once ) is to download the file and add custom domains if you have some, but this is usually not required since everything that doesn't break the "web experience" is blocked by default.

> There are many project online that do that for you.

Can you give an example?

http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/

http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/index.php is what I use

I don't have any memorized. This is what I do, search online for: +hosts +block

Why would you be more worried about corporate surveillance?

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