[via: Cato]

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So What If Corporations Aren’t People? “Corporate participation in public discourse has long been a controversial issue, one that was reignited by the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC, 130 S. Ct. 876 (2010). Much of the criticism of Citizens United stems from the claim that the Constitution does not protect corporations because they are not “real” people. While it’s true that corporations aren’t human beings, that truism is constitutionally irrelevant because corporations are formed by individuals as a means of exercising their constitutionally protected rights. When individuals pool their resources and speak under the legal fiction of a corporation, they do not lose their rights. It cannot be any other way; in a world where corporations are not entitled to constitutional protections, the police would be free to storm office buildings and seize computers or documents. The mayor of New York City could exercise eminent domain over Rockefeller Center by fiat and without compensation if he decides he’d like to move his office there. Moreover, the government would be able to censor all corporate speech, including that of so-called media corporations. In short, rights-bearing individuals do not forfeit those rights when they associate in groups. This essay will demonstrate why the common argument that corporations lack rights because they aren’t people demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of both the nature of corporations and the First Amendment.” http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1873158

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Matt Webb

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Schumpeter

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Taxes & Voting: “[...] Thoreau [...] argues that people should be allowed to decide to not pay their taxes if they decide to withdraw from the political system. He does, however, make a point of saying that people should pay for what they use, such as paying the highway tax if one uses the highway. [...]” http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=2695

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Common tax rules for companies operating in EU: “How it works
Corporate tax rates in the EU will not change. EU countries will continue to decide on their own corporate tax rates.
When calculating their taxes, companies would have a choice of using the different national systems or the single set of rules.
For example, a company may have operations in four EU countries – three with profits and one with a loss.
The company would be able to file one tax return instead of four. It would add up its profits, subtract its losses and use the common rules to calculate deductions and exemptions – arriving at a single taxable sum.
Each of the four countries would collect taxes on a portion of the taxable sum – based on their national rates. The portion would be calculated through a formula set out by the rules.
For the proposal to become law, the EU’s governments must agree to it after consultation with the European Parliament.” http://ec.europa.eu/news/economy/110318_1_en.htm

http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/taxation/company_tax/common_tax_base/index_en.htm

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“[...] get rid of the power. Political power is, in fact, the source of the wealth concentrations that fund the industry lobbyists and the campaign contributions. The wealth of big business and the plutocracy is funneled to them by subsidies, protections, oligopoly markups on state-cartelized markets, scarcity rents from artificial property rights, etc., none of which would exist without the state.

Getting rid of the power seemingly involves a Catch-22: How can you dismantle the state policies underlying the political means to wealth, when you’re outspent and outgunned in the policy-making process by those who profit from it? How do you change the system to prevent their making money off it, in a system rigged in favor of the big money?

The answer: Get rid of the money. At first glance this seems to be a circular argument, since — to repeat — we can’t challenge their control of the political means to wealth.

No, we get rid of the money in politics by undermining — at the economic level — the means by which the plutocracy makes its money. For example, we destroy the proprietary content industries’ ability to make money — not by contesting their power in the political arenas where legislation like the DMCA is passed — but by combating their ability to enforce the copyright laws they make money from. We’ll probably never secure the repeal of DMCA in Congress. But we can destroy the record and movie industries’ profit economically, with weapons like torrent download, strong encryption, and proxies — and laugh ourselves silly at the blustering of clowns like Lieberman and Biden. [...]

We solve the problem of money in politics, not by contesting money’s control of the political process — but by economically destroying the political profiteers’ power to make money, and rendering their political power useless.” http://c4ss.org/content/6416

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Critique of The Story of Citizens United v. FEC: Annie Leonard released a video titled “The Story of Citizens United v. FEC,” an eight-and-a-half-minute criticism of http://theunitedpersons.org/blog/420

Lee Doren made his own video critique above in response to Ms. Leonard’s offering.

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Supreme Court Backs Government Transparency Over Corporate Privacy Claims https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/03/supreme-court-backs-government-transparency-over

Cf. http://theunitedpersons.org/blog/supreme-court-whether-corporations-may-assert-personal-privacy-interests

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The UK’s Progressive Tea Party – “In the UK, the Great Recession inspired ordinary people to take on corporate tax evaders—with enormous success”: http://www.yesmagazine.org/new-economy/the-uks-progressive-tea-party

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Privacy of legal persons: “Does FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] give corporations the same personal privacy rights as natural born people?” http://epic.org/amicus/fccvatt/

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“

If corporations must be treated as “persons” for the purpose of campaign contributions – as the Supreme Court mandated last year in the infamous Citizens United decision – why shouldn’t they also enjoy “personal privacy”? [...]

[...] we should ask about the social functions served by privacy protections. Yes weaker privacy protections make it easier to hold firms accountable, but that applies to individual humans as well. And if stronger privacy protects folks more against abuse by governments or others, that benefit should apply to firms as well. Yes people may just have a direct preference for privacy, but such preferences may be weak, and perhaps people working at a firm feel similarly about the privacy of their firm.

For most definition disputes, pretending to resolve it via conceptual analysis just isn’t very honest. It is more honest to argue about the desirability of various consequences of alternate social conventions.”

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/01/define-via-consequences.html

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“[...] cities and companies differ in a very fundamental regard: cities almost never die, while companies are extremely ephemeral. As West notes, Hurricane Katrina couldn’t wipe out New Orleans, and a nuclear bomb did not erase Hiroshima from the map. In contrast, where are Pan Am and Enron today? The modern corporation has an average life span of 40 to 50 years.

This raises the obvious question: Why are corporations so fleeting? After buying data on more than 23,000 publicly traded companies, Bettencourt and West discovered that corporate productivity, unlike urban productivity, was entirely sublinear. As the number of employees grows, the amount of profit per employee shrinks. West gets giddy when he shows me the linear regression charts. “Look at this bloody plot,” he says. “It’s ridiculous how well the points line up.” The graph reflects the bleak reality of corporate growth, in which efficiencies of scale are almost always outweighed by the burdens of bureaucracy. “When a company starts out, it’s all about the new idea,” West says. “And then, if the company gets lucky, the idea takes off. Everybody is happy and rich. But then management starts worrying about the bottom line, and so all these people are hired to keep track of the paper clips. This is the beginning of the end.”

The danger, West says, is that the inevitable decline in profit per employee makes large companies increasingly vulnerable to market volatility. Since the company now has to support an expensive staff — overhead costs increase with size — even a minor disturbance can lead to significant losses. As West puts it, “Companies are killed by their need to keep on getting bigger.”

For West, the impermanence of the corporation illuminates the real strength of the metropolis. Unlike companies, which are managed in a top-down fashion by a team of highly paid executives, cities are unruly places, largely immune to the desires of politicians and planners. “Think about how powerless a mayor is,” West says. “They can’t tell people where to live or what to do or who to talk to. Cities can’t be managed, and that’s what keeps them so vibrant. They’re just these insane masses of people, bumping into each other and maybe sharing an idea or two. It’s the freedom of the city that keeps it alive.”” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/magazine/19Urban_West-t.html?_r=3&ref=magazine&pagewanted=all

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1.: http://theunitedpersons.org/blog/speechnow-org-v-fec

2.: https://www.campaignfreedom.org/newsroom/detail/us-supreme-court-declines-to-review-speechnoworg-free-speech-case

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