What's the reasoning behind the corporation needing rights? It seems like if taken far enough my photocopier would need rights, whereas I think it would be more straight-forward to deal with the people behind the instrument rather than the instrument itself.
People join together into organizations so that they can pool resources. Explicitly exempting organizations from first amendment protections makes it easy for the government to side-step that and chill individual rights in the process.
Say the Jeb Bush administration comes along and makes it illegal for corporations to publish documentaries on environmental issues. The individuals at say the Sierra Club can still publish their own documentaries, but their ability to pool resources is gutted. They can't raise donations and store them in the corporation, because the corporation can't then use those funds to make environmental documentaries.
It's not a matter of "corporations having rights." It's a matter of allowing individuals to exercise their rights in organized groups that allow them to have more impact.
I didn't ask why we found it politically expedient to do this or that, I asked why the original poster thought rights for corporations was a fundamentally good idea.
"Because they balance various risks" (as I read your post) may be an accurate description of the world, but isn't an answer for why we don't change it.
Most everyone would agree Sturgeon was right, and doubly so about code - and the legal system is a huge pile of politically motivated spaghetti code written over centuries by people who didn't try to get a big picture. We need to decide what parts of our laws capture and define our image of ourselves and what parts are garbage.
So rather than create rights for money to prevent DEA seizures or enacting rights for corporations, recognize instead the point of a limited government. Everything that is not expressly forbidden is allowed. We can't fix our current government into that with more laws.
I'd find that argument a lot more compelling if the speech afforded the group (corporation) by its 1st Amendment rights were a reflection of the will and judgement of the members — that is, everyone at the corporation, and not, as seems so often to be the case, merely an extension of its owners speech rights.
Corporations are incredible concentrators of wealth, and consequently power, and those concentrations of wealth and power can espouse actions and principles that are frequently at odds with the well-being of that corporation's employees — the very people whose speech the Citizens United ruling purports to prevent being curtailed. Witness the allegations during the last Presidential election cycle of a mining company in Ohio (Murray Energy) requiring its employees to use an unpaid workday to attend a Romney rally — or lose their jobs.
How, exactly, is such "group speech" at all reflective of the political views of that group's membership?
Name the large group of people in an organization that DOES NOT concentrate the power hierarchically?
Corporations have CEOs and boards of directors. Non-profits do likewise. Large Newspapers have the owners and chief editors. Unions have Union Bosses and various types of decision boards. Churches have Popes, Cardinals, etc.
People often group together PRECISELY TO CONCENTRATE POWER. Why is it surprising? Why should Corporations be singled out for special treatment?
2. In our history as a species, that same (fallacious) argument could have been, and almost certainly was used to support slavery, human sacrifice, and genocide, among other charming and socially redeeming things.
I really couldn't care less whether a particular tribe-of-monkeys behavior has always been around or not. My ethical compass is pretty firmly tuned to one fundamental principle: the net increase in human freedom — freedom of action, and freedom from harm; freedom of expression, and freedom from exploitation. I care whether a particular tribe-of-monkeys behavior serves to benefit one group of monkeys at the expense of another.
To my mind, this one — the concentration of power in the hands of a few, built on the backs of many, which is then used to enact social norms or policy that are often counter to the interests of those many — does.
No one is forced to participate in a corporation. If you like freedom so much, why don't you think people should be free to choose to pool their resources, and to give some of their control of those resources up to the group's leadership?
I explicitly stated that people choose to group together to concentrate power.
The examples given were to counter your specific argument against corporations by showing you that there are many similar organizations that are acceptable concentrations of power.
The rest of your post ignored that context and furiously battled a straw man.
You changed the meaning of 'concentrate'. People don't intend to have their orgs hijacked by their leaders, and some groups have bylaws to prevent that.
The members of a corporation are the shareholders, not the employees. The employee equivalent to a corporation is a union, which also has free speech rights.
Certainly not! I'm not in a union and I give money and time to a variety of nonprofit organizations. The EFF, for instance, is a corporation that exists to concentrate the power of many people who care about online rights and freedoms. The Sierra Club is a corporation that concentrates the power of people who care about the environment. Etc.
EFF is just an example. The point is that any group of individuals can form and/or fund a corporation to concentrate their speech on whatever topic they want.
But you do lose many of your responsibilities behind the corporate veil. That's the thing that's so weird. Corporations don't merely give their constituent people a vehicle to exercise their rights. Corporations are totally separate people from any person inside the corporation.
Just looked at the largest union, the NEA. It's incorporated in many states for various reasons. Should that prevent it from participating in political discourse?
The corporate veil protects shareholders from being personally liable for the debts and obligations incurred by the corporation. Speech does not create debts or obligations, so the veil is not an issue.
Corporate speech is subject to some regulation, just like personal speech. Corporations can be sued for slander and libel, advertisements must meet certain standards of truthfulness, etc.
On top of the fact that it's practically impossible to make a libel accusation stick when political speech is even barely provable - being incorporated doesn't prevent a libel proceeding from moving forward. It just means that it's more difficult to pin it to individuals within the corporation.
Even then, there are ways that the corporate veil can be pierced to still go after individuals.
