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Jewish World Review Jan 18, 2012/ 23 Teves, 5772 People Inc. By Jonah Goldberg
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
"Corporations are people, my friend," It was among the first of what appears to be a growing list of gaffes Democrats will use to hang around Romney's neck in the less than certain but more than likely eventuality that he is the Republican nominee for president. Much like his more recent statement about how he likes to "fire people," the corporation remark has been taken grossly out of context. The "fire people" line simply referred to the fact that he likes to use his power as a consumer to deny his support to firms -- specifically insurance companies -- that don't provide good service. Who doesn't like doing that? Let me know who you are and I will gladly sell you a lifetime supply of unicorn repellent. No refunds, of course. Meanwhile, his point about corporations being people was simply that raising taxes on corporations means raising taxes on people, because the corporations will pass the costs of those taxes on to consumers. It didn't matter. Romney has something of a gift for making his arguments sound worse than they are. A "corporate raider" -- as unfair as that term may be -- just shouldn't be using the phrase "I like to fire people" in any context, never mind amid a really awful economy. I don't care if the full sentence is "I like to fire people who hurt puppies," you know which snippet the Similarly, Romney's point about corporations was entirely valid, as some liberal writers, such as OK, corporations aren't people in the whole carbon-based humanoid life form sense. If they were, then All corporate personhood means is that corporations are legal entities that have certain rights or "standing" under the law. The law does this for several reasons, but first among them is the simple fact that people don't lose their rights when they associate in groups, whether it's a corporation, a labor union, a nonprofit organization or even a newspaper. As legal scholar It's really that simple. When liberals insist that corporations aren't really people-people, they do so on the false assumption that conservatives were running around like Agreed. But so what? The law doesn't in fact treat corporations just like people. Corporations can't vote or be drafted. And people can't sell fractional shares of themselves. The war on corporate personhood is really nothing more than a novel ploy to regulate corporations more. What I find most fascinating about the debate over corporate personhood is the fact that the people who defend corporate personhood don't anthropomorphize big business nearly as much as those who oppose it. After all, if
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