The argument against the notion that corporations are people is so simple: A corporation is a government-defined, sanctioned, licensed, and registered organization. It exists as a legal concept and will cease to exist as it stands should there be no government. An actual human being, on the other hand, may have a legal definition of sorts, but a human will continue to exist without government.
Filed under: Misc | Tagged: Corporations are not people, Thought of the day |
For the Sake of Science 
Corporations are not people. However corporations become a living body with personality and purpose which is animated by the ‘people’ working in it. The idea that a corporation can become a living enitity motioned by people I find fascinating.
I would agree, however I think It’s important to understand that corporations consist of individuals and that those individuals do not give up their freedoms by becoming part of a corporation. On the flip side, I also don’t think that same group of people should be given immunity from liability simply because they are part of a group.
Michael Hawkins naivety to science and expression will improve, I hope with the help of wisdom if he allows this to happen.. In the meantime I suggest that, whilst hiking, he does more thinking.
Respectfully – powerfulheart
You, sir, are ironically bad at expressing yourself.
Disrespectfully,
Fuck your face
But you are okay with ‘marital personhood’? Marriage is almost exactly the same thing, the incorporation of multiple entities into a new, separate & single, legally defined and recognized entity.
Corporations are not dependent on the government for their existence as you say because they are in fact the exact same thing, a group of people banded together for mutual benefits, protections, and so on. It’s virtually impossible to distinguish between the two if you stand back a distance and look at the whole.
As The Bard said:
What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
I don’t see how corporations are not dependent upon government when many of those very protections they seek are a direct result of government.
If a bunch of people want to get together and call themselves Kohl’s, they can, but without government, that doesn’t mean very much.
A bunch of people can get together and call themselves a government and it would mean no more.
Countries, borders, money, governments, corporations, they all rely on the “Tinkerbell Effect”.
One of the major pieces of the modern world is corporate personhood, without it you can’t sue Microsoft anymore than you can sue a bookshelf. A group of people get together and form a corporation/government it’s freestanding and self sustaining. In fact, when new towns and cities (and so on) are created the term used is “incorporation”, which puts a neat bow on the top of the whole thing. That’s why I say that corporations and governments are all but indistinguishable from one another.
It’s a circular, which came first, the chicken or the egg, sort of thing.
A corporation is something which operates within a given framework; it’s something that’s dependent upon rules/laws. If it wasn’t, then people banding together and calling themselves one wouldn’t make any difference to anything since there wouldn’t be any rules that apply in the first place. Government, on the other hand, is itself the framework. On a Venn diagram, the arbitrariness of governments and corporations only overlaps in a small area.
As for corporate personhood, that’s really the thing. The qualifier “corporate” makes it a fundamentally different thing from your run of the mill personhood. That’s why the dissolution of the United States government would end Walmart’s corporate status but not my person status.
The existence of each rely on recognition, specifically as distinct individuals that hold responsibility for their own actions, who is doing that recognition is not really relevant and seems to be the point you are ignoring or missing. The dissolution of the US government might end Wal-Marts recognition by the government, and the rules that government set, but that doesn’t necessarily change anything at all. The company would still be a personality and actor distinct from it’s owners and distinct from their actions.