Most conservatives are, well just conservative people who have a point of view. They don't call the shots though.
The US has by far the strongest free speech protections of any nation. It’s not really that surprising that the Supreme Court ruled that forming a corporation doesn’t annual free speech rights.
People can still donate their money, but to allow corporations, which are explicitly created to concentrate money and power, to donate money to politicians, that has a massive impact.
The people working for a company can have free speech without the company itself having free speech. In fact, some companies having a tendency to curb free speech through contracts denying people the right to talk about certain things.
And then there's also the issue that corporations get used to dodge personal liability by their owners and employees. If corporations don't share their people's responsibilities, why should they get to share their speech? Corporations are very explicitly a separate entity, and not merely the group of people working for it.
Nope. It is about prohibiting corporations and unions from using their funds to make independent expenditures for speech [1].
> In fact, some companies having a tendency to curb free speech through contracts denying people the right to talk about certain things.
Your example is strange. Such contracts are not imposed by the government.
> corporations get used to dodge personal liability by their owners and employees
You should clarify what you mean by this and how it is relevant to the issue at hand.
My argument is that only people are people. Corporations are explicitly different, and there's no good reason for corporations to automatically have the same rights as people.
The whole problem with Citizens United is that it uses the 1st amendment right of free speech for people to grant corporations the right to make political donations, which makes no sense. Corporations are not people and donations are not speech. It's no wonder that this leads to a political system that represents corporations more than it represents people.
I apologize if I'm rehashing some points covered a million times. What you described sounds prima facie reasonable, but then doesn't it follow that organizations should speak with the voices of people they're grouping together? So using your example, NYT should speak with the voices of its C-suite, or board, or investors - and not with the voices of its 4300 employees[0]! That is, the "voice" should not scale with the company size. Scaling like this sounds like cheating to me, given that companies are mostly made of people who have no say in anything.
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[0] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/192894/number-of-employe...
Usually those kind of generalisations are wrong and short-sighted, and I generally want to give people the benefit of the doubt, but at this point it's getting rather hard to deny.
I'm willing to believe that even the Bush jr. administration honestly believed in what they were doing, but everything that happened since then, from the way they tried to sabotage Obama in every possible way, and then electing Trump and the way they're trying to protect him, it's getting hard to deny that their primary priorities are apparently screwing poor and black people and women, ensuring corporate profits for their backers at any cost, and protecting anyone from their own party and screwing the other party, no matter how much it may hurt the country or the world.
You don’t want insurance to be like banking where banks domicile in “friendly” places like Delaware and South Dakota. Health insurance is awful enough.
Republicans want this so that high cost, low benefit plans can be hocked to less sophisticated people. The more right wing folks also like shared responsibility pools where the members are the insurers, and the organizers take overhead. Obamacare put most of these out of business.