Sadly this gets muddied in a sea of "representatives" and lobby groups which claim to represent people...
Its good to keep in mind corporations include a large class of entities like public colleges, newspapers, internet providers, charities, political parties, organized religions, public interest groups, and of course for profit businesses. Saying all these entities should have no rights is advocating for the state to have unchecked and arbitrary power over all of them.
I will admit i have not thought long and hard on this. But on the surface it seems like the answer is "Yes".
But the individuals working in those corporations do. So when a journalist submits an article their free speech is protected as an individual rights extended through the corporation. Similarly for property rights...
I think the idea i'm trying to get at is that these corporations shouldnt have influence beyond the voting power they represent, ie the people.
Speaking of ideals, for example a hypothetical single employee business w/ billions in wealth should have 1 unit of political power, whereas a public interest group with a few thousand of dollars but 100 people should have 100 units of political power.
Edit: Corrected my "No" --> "Yes" because the question sentence was confusing
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/06/opinion/citizens-united-c...
It is immaterial whether the increased corruption was an incidental side effect, or the whole point. From the perspective of the individual citizens being exploited, it doesn't matter whether it was the government exploiting them or a corporation exploiting them after having bought the franchise from the government.
I would argue that so long as corporations continue to exist they require a minimum amount of rights, such as a right to due process, or else they just become tools for the state to act without any of the restraints our current system has developed.
The idea is, should corporations have all the same free speech rights as individuals, or can we limit them? I can think of at least one reason why maybe we should limit them: accountability. If I yell fire in a crowded theater I can be charged with a crime. A corporation can be as well, but in practice enforcement is problematic. There is also the question of moral accountability. If I write an Op Ed saying kids should smoke cigarettes I have to live with it. If a company runs an ad campaign it's hard to know who really is responsible.
But I understand why people disagree. This isn't a simple issue.
That's absolutely true. Neither a corporation nor an individual can engage in libel, some types of obscenity, true threats, etc. Furthermore, there are indeed cases where corporate entities are treated differently than individuals, and no one seriously argues that it's inappropriate to do so (there's no corporate right to bear arms, for instance, and corporations don't cast votes in elections). On the other hand, there are obviously very important situations where a corporation must be treated as a legal "person" (to sue and be sued, to own property, etc.)
The crux of the argument that won in Citizen's United is that, among all types of speech, it's political speech that must be jealously protected. Even though there are serious arguments against allowing corporations to participate in campaign-related speech, it was found that there was not enough of a compelling government interest to overcome the strict constitutional scrutiny that is required when the government seeks to limit political participation. As corporations are just groups of people who form an entity to pool resources and share in ownership, those groups of people do not lose their rights because they pick one social and legal structure over another (for instance, a school, non-profit, or a church). The important example was of a corporate entity producing a video that was critical of Hillary Clinton within some amount of time before an election.
The "you cannot yell 'fire' in a crowded theater" argument makes it seem as if others are denying that the government can regulate any speech, but that is not true, people understand the current state of the law.
I think I can rephrase your argument as: "I cannot shout 'fire' in a crowded theater, so obviously some speech can be prohibited. Therefore, since we're only talking about where to draw the line, it can be drawn over here where I'm advocating it be drawn." This ignores distinctions between situations that have been acknowledged for a long time. You cannot shout "fire" (falsely) in a crowded theater because it would be illegal to say something false when you know it is likely to cause immediate harm. It is also illegal to do other things that are kinda-sort-of free speech related if you look at them the right way -- you can't lie for financial gain, you can't lie to obstruct an investigation, you can't lie under oath, you can't file a false police report, etc. etc. Because these are all true, it doesn't mean that in a different situation speech can necessarily be regulated because we've already crossed the line out of absolutism and into situationally-dependent regulation.
Reading your post helped me think of a more concise way to say this. So thank you. And again.. I am not really sure and I see both sides.
In the case of Intuit, the government opts out of providing a service so that a corporation can seek rent.
A corporate entity has rights and powers that ordinary people do not, so they are more than "just groups of people". They are independent entities all their own.
Further, they can only exist because the government grants them that privilege, and the government can technically place any restrictions they like on them. In the past, the government used to require that the corporation serve the public good as part of the conditions for their existence.
I don't think it's right or accurate to characterize corporations as just "groups of people" and therefore they should have the rights of people. The law and the courts don't think so, either, which is why corporations are treated differently (with fewer rights) than people are.
> The responsible corporate officer (RCO) doctrine holds that a corporate officer is indirectly liable for a subordinate's criminal conduct when the officer is in a position of responsibility. The officer can be prosecuted if he has the authority and the ability to stop the offense and yet fails to act.
The RCO doctrine does not require proof that the officer either participated in or authorized the crime.
The ACLU, Sierra Club, etc., are all corporations. They need to be corporations in order to enable their fund-raising and nationwide scope of activities. Nobody really thinks the ACLU shouldn't have the right to free speech. (Note: The ACLU was on the winning side in Citizens United.) What people are opposed to is the content of the speech that some people speak when acting through the corporate form. (Citizens United was about a movie critical of Hilary Clinton.) But if free speech means anything, it means you can't single out speech based on content.
In reality, the law and the courts do not really consider corporations to be the equivalent of people generally.
This is not actually the case. Corporations are entities separate and independent from their "owners". That fact is why there's such a thing as a corporate shield that mostly prevents the owners from being held responsible for the misbehavior of the corporation.
Corporations are proxies for some combination of their shareholders, their management, and their chartering government, but not simple proxies for any of the three.