Comment by shawndrost

Comment by shawndrost 17 hours ago

I don't understand this POV, can you explain what I'm missing?

Usually when people say "corporations aren't people" I think they are confused about the need for an abstraction. But you acknowledged the need for an abstraction.

I don't imagine you are confused about the status quo of the legal terminology? AFAIK, the current facts are: the legal term "person" encompasses "natural person" (ie the common meaning of "person") and "legal person" (ie the common usage of "corporation"). In legalese, owning shares of legal persons is not slavery; owning shares of natural persons is; owning shares of "people" is ambiguous.

I don't imagine you are advocating for a change in legal terminology. It seems like it would be an outrageously painful find-and-replace in the largest codebase ever? And for what upside? It's like some non-programmer advocating to abandon the use of the word "master" in git, but literally a billion times worse.

Are you are just gesturing at a broader political agenda about reducing corporate power? Or something else I am not picking up on?

foolswisdom 17 hours ago

The argument is that the need for abstraction doesn't mean we must reuse an existing concept. We should be able to talk about corporations as entities and talk about what laws or rights should apply, without needing to call them people.

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thfuran 16 hours ago

But the existing concept by and large has the properties we want. The ability to form contracts, to be held civilly or criminally liable for misconduct, to own property, etc. That we say something is a juridical person isn't some kind of moral claim that it's equivalent in importance to a human, it's just a legal classification.

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- acka 11 hours ago
  
  Corporations can be held criminally liable, but they can't go to prison. And while lots of countries have gotten rid of the death penalty, a corporation can actually be "executed" by getting dissolved.
  I think these are some pretty big deals.
  
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- jabbywocker 14 hours ago
  
  At least for me, the problem is that making them completely equivalent in a legal sense has undesirable outcomes, like Citizens United. Having distinct terms allows for creating distinct, but potential overlapping sets of laws/privileges/rights. Using the same term makes it much harder to argue for distinctions in key areas
  
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  thfuran 14 hours ago
  
  But they aren't completely equivalent. Natural persons can vote; juridical persons cannot. Natural persons have a constitutional right to avoid self-incrimination; juridical persons do not; etc. There's just a lot in common between the two, because it makes sense for there to be a lot in common. Citizen's United v FEC was a transparently terrible ruling, but it was in no way implied by the mere existence of corporate personhood. It was a significant expansion of the interpretation of corporate personhood that directly overturned a prior supreme court ruling on campaign finance regulation.
  
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- rendaw 12 hours ago
  
  It also has a lot of properties we don't want, no? Freedom of travel, enlist in the army, drink alcohol after a certain age, get married, etc etc.
  
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  thfuran 11 hours ago
  
  A few. But weighed against pretty much all of tort law and contract law, which heavily lean on the similar treatment, those are some pretty tiny edge cases that it's easy to say only apply to natural persons.
  
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- f0a0464cc8012 14 hours ago
  
  But then why does a corporation need freedom of speech etc?
  
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  hrimfaxi 13 hours ago
  
  Because a corporation is a group of people, and a group of people don't lose their freedom of speech just because they joined a collective.
  And corporations can stand for things. They can have missions and use funds to effect speech in support of causes that align with their beliefs.
  
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  tekla 12 hours ago
  
  If a group of workers create a Union, should the Union be allowed free speech?
  
  Reply View | 2 replies

ghtbircshotbe 2 hours ago

Or you could just take the obvious and literally meaning of the phrase "corporations are not people" and not say that everyone who says it is confused. Corporations have different incentives, legal requirements, rights and responsibilities.

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