Skip to main content

Corporations and the Constitution: A rare disagreement with Coyote

Coyote Blog is one of my favorites: driven by critical thinking and hard data.

Nonetheless, I disagree with the Coyote on this one:

Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech. Doesn’t say by whom or for what. There are no modifiers. Doesn’t say “except when individuals organize themselves into a corporation.”


My disagreement comes from the fact that free of speech does not mean freedom from consequences for speech. Freedom of speech, as it was intended by the Framers, meant freedom from prior restraint. I cannot be stopped from speaking about you, but if I threaten you, libel you, slander you, or engage in fighting words, then you have recourse against me.

If a normal business partnership does that, I have recourse against the business and the individuals who organized that speech.

But the individuals who have organized themselves into a corporation have done so, at least in part, for the purpose of avoiding personal liability for their actions. That means that a specific individual with power within a corporation may, if acting in his/her official capacity, threaten me, libel me, slander me, and even issue fighting words, and I have no recourse against that individual, but only the assets of the corporation.

I have a distinct problem with people using a state-supported business structure to avoid the consequences of their individual actions.

Corporations are as much if not more creatures of the state than creatures of market forces. You cannot have a limited liabiity business model without the power of the State to enforce those limitations.

Moreover, corporations in practice serve as tax farmers for the State.

Sorry: I don't buy State-award artificial personhood, and I do not buy corporations rather than individuals being protected by the Bill of Rights.

Comments

Delaware Watch said…
"I don't buy State-award artificial personhood, and I do not buy corporations rather than individuals being protected by the Bill of Rights."

Amen!!
Nancy Willing said…
ditto
Unknown said…
Excellent argument, Steve, using an argument that I have never before encountered, but which makes a lot of sense! So I also say "Amen".

Popular posts from this blog

Comment Rescue (?) and child-related gun violence in Delaware

In my post about the idiotic over-reaction to a New Jersey 10-year-old posing with his new squirrel rifle , Dana Garrett left me this response: One waits, apparently in vain, for you to post the annual rates of children who either shoot themselves or someone else with a gun. But then you Libertarians are notoriously ambivalent to and silent about data and facts and would rather talk abstract principles and fear monger (like the government will confiscate your guns). It doesn't require any degree of subtlety to see why you are data and fact adverse. The facts indicate we have a crisis with gun violence and accidents in the USA, and Libertarians offer nothing credible to address it. Lives, even the lives of children, get sacrificed to the fetishism of liberty. That's intellectual cowardice. OK, Dana, let's talk facts. According to the Children's Defense Fund , which is itself only querying the CDCP data base, fewer than 10 children/teens were killed per year in Delaw

With apologies to Hube: dopey WNJ comments of the week

(Well, Hube, at least I'm pulling out Facebook comments and not poaching on your preserve in the Letters.) You will all remember the case this week of the photo of the young man posing with the .22LR squirrel rifle that his Dad got him for his birthday with resulted in Family Services and the local police attempting to search his house.  The story itself is a travesty since neither the father nor the boy had done anything remotely illegal (and check out the picture for how careful the son is being not to have his finger inside the trigger guard when the photo was taken). But the incident is chiefly important for revealing in the Comments Section--within Delaware--the fact that many backers of "common sense gun laws" really do have the elimination of 2nd Amendment rights and eventual outright confiscation of all privately held firearms as their objective: Let's run that by again: Elliot Jacobson says, This instance is not a case of a father bonding with h

The Obligatory Libertarian Tax Day Post

The most disturbing factoid that I learned on Tax Day was that the average American must now spend a full twenty-four hours filling out tax forms. That's three work days. Or, think of it this way: if you had to put in two hours per night after dinner to finish your taxes, that's two weeks (with Sundays off). I saw a talking head economics professor on some Philly TV channel pontificating about how Americans procrastinate. He was laughing. The IRS guy they interviewed actually said, "Tick, tick, tick." You have to wonder if Governor Ruth Ann Minner and her cohorts put in twenty-four hours pondering whether or not to give Kraft Foods $708,000 of our State taxes while demanding that school districts return $8-10 million each?