Quote:
Originally Posted by mookiemookie
When did I say unions should be treated differently?
I don't care if a corporation is a group of people. It matters not. The individual people each have their right to free speech. They don't get to participate again as a member of a collective group. A corporation IS NOT A PERSON. It is an article on paper, a legal fiction. It is not subject to the obligations of an individual in this country, and thus should not enjoy the benefits.
Don't paint this as "Mookie wants to shut people up he doesn't agree with." That is completely dishonest and lends no credit to your argument. I want to reserve the rights for WE THE PEOPLE of this country. A corporation is NOT A PERSON.
Pragmatically, what good do you think is going to come from giving big business even more say in government? Jefferson saw the problem 200 years ago: “I hope we shall... crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and to bid defiance to the laws of our country." - Thomas Jefferson, letter to George Logan. November 12, 1816
Good lord, these people spent the Bush years twisting the Bill of Rights around so that it didn't apply to people they didn't like. I find it amazing that they now are jumping through hoops to make it apply to non-persons now.
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An excellent argument, mookie, and I tend to agree with you, but this line of resoning will not present a solution or even identify the real problem.
The only point on which I disagree is the idea that people do not get to voice their opinion again as a collective. We have the right to free speech, but we also have the right to assemble. If a bunch of people with the same opinion, no matter what entity they are a part of, collectively use their right to individual free speech there can be no truly constitutional, effective, or even desireable action taken against them.
Trying to prevent corporations or any other kind of common large-scale collective entity from exerting an undue influence upon politics is an excercise in futility. Even if you work around the constitutional barriers to free speech and assembly (which has been done, on more than one occassion), you will still only create an unenforceable system that doesn't fix anything.
I say unenforceable because people will coalesce into voting blocks no matter what you do, and those blocks will usually conform to some kind of pre-defined issue boundary, as I'm sure you're aware. If you cap corporate contributions or otherwise restrict the actions of members that comprise them they will simply take advantage of the aforementioned fact and use it to bypass the system. For example, let's say that EvilCorp International has an agenda that includes domestic drilling, and there is a candidate who supports it, but EvilCorp's campaign contributions have been capped or eliminated altogether. Since it can't contribute directly, it will just contribute indirectly. All manner or corporate literature will be disbursed to employees and the organization will host, fund, and otherwise assist non-corporate entities with the same agenda. Similarly, if it can't provide its own lobbyists it will simply fund lobbyists with similar objectives from non-restricted entites.
In fact, this has already been going on for quite some time now. A good example lies in the AARP, one of the most prevalent and infamous groups of citizens with a common agenda. It also regularly recieves contributions from companies in the medical field. Campaign reform or no, it is still a huge voting block, and a million 1$ contributions still equals a million dollars. And then, of course, we have political parties themselves. If companies can't get direct access to policymakers they will simply shift the party platform.
Even if the laws are made so restricitve that lobbying as we know it disappears alotogether we'd still be handing the advantage to big business because they already have a well-established structure with a vested interest in the survival of the company.
I say that this will not fix anything because to try to seek out and close down all the means by which such an organization could pressure the state is to violate personal freedoms in the process and ultimately fail, anyway. Powerful companies have legions of attorneys and accounting experts whose livleyhood depends upon achieving satisfactory results with the tasks they are assigned. There is no law or set of laws in the world that will stop them from ultimately accomplishing their objectives, unless we resort to an iron-handed state, which will only kill business along with lobbying for a short time before it resurfaces again in a different form.
Even worse, there will be multitudes of small companies crushed underfoot in the process. Small businesses often band together for political representation because they cannot compete with larger companies on their own. Restrictions placed upon large corporations are bound to affect small corporations as well, not only because small corporations are subject to the same laws but because big corporations have more money to spend on workarounds. Small business is vital to controlling the threat of monopoly, and in cases where the state is not involved it has done a remarkably good job, though such cases tend to be in secondary or specialist industries - the big ones have long since co-opted the state.
Most of all, however, the most dangerous thing about thinking that the political influence of big business can be controlled by any reasonable means is that it perverts the market. Reasonable free markets have their problems, to be sure, but they are nothing compared to the kind of damage inflicted when all kinds of state factors are introduced. Companies that can afford to do so will co-opt the state and use it as a means to defeat competitors outside normal market mechanisms. Others will simply move elsewhere. The latter is particularly prevalent in our increasingly globalized society. As transportation and communication grow more efficient the need for proximity to resources or consumners shrinks, and there are always a dozen nations with easily co-optable governments and poor, cheaply-employed populaces for every reasonably prosperous free nation.
Corporations may be legal fictions, mookie, but don't assume that just because of that they are not people; they
are made of people and they
will act like people. The same goes for governments. To treat either otherwise in the objective sense is to invite catastrophe.
The only way to way to ensure that the power belongs to "we, the people" is to give it to the people..... and no-one else. Each person should have the power to conduct their own affairs, neither hindered nor aided by the state, to paraphrase TJ. The state's responsibilities should be clearly defined, strictly limited, and vigilantly monitored by an armed populace so that it will not be cost-effective to try to manipulate it in any way unless there is a vast majority opinion.
Tylenol and Aspirin may help headaches, but neither kills tumors. While our nation wastes time quarelling over how much money should be spent on campagins or whether elections are fair or not we are ignoring the cause of our consternation; the fact that we have a vulnerable power structure. As long as the state has enough power to attract the ambitious we will never know peace or prosperity for long.