Actually the founding fathers were very aware of corporations and their intertwining with political power. For example the Boston Tea Party destroyed property of the East India Company to protest laws passed by the English Parliament on behalf of that corporation, undoubtably motivated by the large monetary contributions that said corporation made to the elections for Parliament.
The result is that there is no shortage of commentary from the founding fathers on the evils of corporations. And that is why in the early days of the Republic a majority of US states had laws BANNING corporations from engaging in any kind of political activities.
It is historically absurd to maintain that the founding fathers merely overlooked the possibility that corporations would want to engage in political speech. The did not overlook it - they had seen it up close and emphatically wanted no part of it!
If you were right, then they should have explicitly and specifically carved corporations out of the Bill of Rights, which they obviously did not do. That was not an oversight.
The idea that corporations could be considered people with natural rights did not surface until a century later, and would have seemed absurd to the founders. If they had thought that such an absurd interpretation was a serious risk, I'm sure that they would have made their position clear, but the question never arose at the time.
That ruling said that contracts created by corporations, defined under the law explicitly as things that can enter into contracts, are legal and enforceable, and not able to be changed by the government.
This makes sense since enabling groups of people to enter into into and honoring contracts is the point of corporations. But the principle that corporations have natural liberties as persons is generally dated back to the 1880s and jurisprudence about the 14th amendment. At that point the founding fathers were all long dead, and the 14th amendment itself was added long after the founding fathers died.
Adam Smith himself was highly critical of corporations. I've read that the idea of granting corporations the rights of immortal people had been bandied about in his time, and his opinion of this was that it would be "barbarism".
I can't find a citation for this now, but it's completely consistent with what I know of him.
Aye. Wealth of Nations was brilliant logical analysis of the realities of markets. It was not the moral apologia and religious gospel that free marketeers pretend it is.
It's also interesting to quiz so-called Libertarians on who they think might have said this:
"[Our country has become] a pristine aristocracy of the wealthy, vested in large corporations, moneyed by the banks, and ruling over the plundered plowman."
And this:
"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered."
I'll ask you to cite a sources for these quotes; neither sounds at all like Jefferson's writing style - especially the latter one - and the vocabulary seems to indicate a much more recent origin. (The term "corporation" wouldn't have been used in quite its modern sense during his lifetime.)
There is a similar quote by Jefferson that speaks about banking establishments being more dangerous than standing armies, but the term "establishment" there isn't a synonym for "institution" - think about what "establishment" meant with respect to religion in his era - and the position that I interpret here was one that could be described as somewhat aligned with his position on religion: that there ought to be a sort of "wall of separation" between the financial economy and the state in parallel to the wall between church and state. In other words, Jefferson is arguing against the politicization of banking, not banks themselves, which seems a strongly free-market position, and somewhat contrary to what you appear to imply.
I've found the exact quote for the first one. It wasn't exact, but close enough. It was in a personal letter from Jefferson to William Giles in 1825:
> a vast accession of strength from their younger recruits, who, having nothing in them of the feelings or principles of '76, now look to a single and splendid government of an aristocracy, founded on banking institutions, and monied incorporations under the guise and cloak of their favored branches of manufactures, commerce and navigation, riding and ruling over the plundered ploughman and beggared yeomanry.
As for the second quote, monticello.org claims that that wording is a retroquote first published in some 1937 Congressional documents and that the actual quote is:
> And I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.
Yes I can, though it's a good question! Probably better couched as "deliberate oversight". Think in a political situation where you don't want to deal with an issue because it'll open a can of worms. 'Don't Ask Don't Tell' in the US ilitary was one such thing. Here's an example f he use of the term in a blog about Apple products: http://www.mikesouthby.co.uk/2011/12/os-x-understanding-enab...
The result is that there is no shortage of commentary from the founding fathers on the evils of corporations. And that is why in the early days of the Republic a majority of US states had laws BANNING corporations from engaging in any kind of political activities.
It is historically absurd to maintain that the founding fathers merely overlooked the possibility that corporations would want to engage in political speech. The did not overlook it - they had seen it up close and emphatically wanted no part of it!