Looking for positives, but especially negatives. What are the pitfalls of not granting corporations the same rights as people/citizens?
Looking for positives, but especially negatives. What are the pitfalls of not granting corporations the same rights as people/citizens?
Corporations are not granted the same rights as natural persons - they’re granted some of the rights of natural persons (and some of those make sense while other are dumb).
Preventing corporations from operating as persons when contributing to political campaigns would be an absolute win for representation… Citizens United was a trash ruling by trash people.
Preventing corporations from operating as persons when interacting with the legal system would massively complicate our legal code and probably lead to a lot of awful edge cases where they could dodge liability for their actions. They are generally immune to manslaughter and some industries have dumb political carve outs (like firearms manufacturers having immunity to most product liability) but people’s ability to sue, i.e. a paper mill after getting luekimeia relies on corporate personhood in our current system.
When we talk about “corporations shouldn’t be people” we (I think it’s fair to be generally inclusive here) are talking about their ability to donate to politicians and political causes.
Starting over means we could actually define how companues are different in a way that does make them liable for the bad stuff instead of doing the lazy ‘treat them like a person with limited accountability’ again.
We won’t, but it would be the best opportunity.
Other than our deeply ingrained political dysfunction there isn’t anything stopping us from redefining the edge cases we care about without tearing it all down. Laws and legal systems are insanely complex and while there is a lot of injustice in the world the source of that isn’t how laws work but small carve out and how those laws are being applied unjustly. As a software engineer that delights in recklessly refactoring entire systems at once I think this is an instance where making small targeted changes would be better for everyone. We know Citizens United is dumb, for example, so congress or the FEC could just pass a law or make a rule to fix that - it’s only our political dysfunction that stops us.
As a functional programmer that delights in recklessly refactoring entire systems at once, I think this is an instance where our entire government needs to be rewritten with a proper “types” system in place so the compiler will warn us when there are inconsistencies in our laws and we can keep refactoring until we reach totality or soundness. We can isolate the side effects of laws and make sure they only do one thing. Laws can be free monads! 🤪
The complexity makes it impossible to not constantly violate laws that the average person doesn’t even know exist.