‘We’re the Wolf PAC and we’re coming.’
29th April 2012
Actually, they’re just breathing hard. And eventually they’ll get over it, because, like the ‘occupy’ movement, their generation has endemic ADHD, and soon another squirrel will cross their paths, and then — all gone, leaving nothing behind but a monumental pile of trash that the grownups will have to clean up, at taxpayer expense.
Nothing better illustrates the ‘graphic novel approach to life’ adopted by far too many of the post-Boomer proletariat than this silly petition.
For one thing, the right in question belongs, not to the corporation as such, to the management of the corporation as agents for the shareholders. So there’s no ‘there’ there — no attribute of a corporation qua corporation to remove. Just as your attorney can spend money on your behalf on political speech in exercise of your First Amendment right, so can a corporation, acting on behalf of the shareholders, individual citizens, in exercise of their First Amendment rights.
(The question whether the shareholders want ‘their’ corporation to exercise their First Amendment rights in any particular individual manner is a question of corporate governance, not of Constitutional right. This is what happens when people not trained in the law attempt attempt political action based on a misapprehension — the problem ain’t what they know, but what they ‘know’ that ain’t so.)
For another thing, that a corporation is in law a person is of the essence of the corporate form of doing business. Wipe that out, and we return to the quasi-partnership joint stock arrangements that were the best that people could do before the Industrial Revolution (which the corporate form was a key ingredient in fostering). So our kiddies are not only ignorant of the law, they are also appallingly ignorant of both history and economics. Somehow that doesn’t surprise me.
This is what comes of sending your kids to government schools: A lot of indignation, but no real knowledge.