Bribing politicians to consider the subsidiary "separate" rather than "wholly owned" would always be cheaper than losing a company like Google or Microsoft to newer fairer tax laws
Discussion
Sure. We definitely need to abolish Citizens United. That goes without saying.
Not that that would completely eliminate bribery, but at least it would make bribery illegal again.
Disagree. Citizens United is just the so-called "supreme court" admitting they can't control what people do with the money they give them after printing it. They'd have even less control under a Bitcoin standard so that would be insane to reverse. Tariffs are a method of taxation that you can actually do pretty consistent enforcement of.
I kinda switched trains of thought without enough explanation there. Difficulty of enforcing taxes is related to difficulty of controlling what people do with money, but not the same topic, of course.
Citizens United determined that corporations are people. That’s dangerous. Corporations should not be able to “contribute to” (bribe) political campaigns.
I don't get why people say that or why the court-brained people involved framed it that way. What makes it ultimately about corporate personhood moreso than the simple pragmatic fact of whether the court's gunmen are or aren't capable of enforcing dollar-by-dollar micromanagement?
It was the mental (or legal) gymnastics they had to use to force it into a 1st Amendment issue.
Corporations don’t (or at least shouldn’t) have 1st amendment rights. Only the people do.
But corporations are just people who call themselves corporations. You can't invalidate your rights by calling yourself a special name
Not invalidating the person’s rights. But corporations don’t have the same rights.
Example:
Corporation refuses to hire black people and blasts racist remarks across their web site. Illegal. Fines. Shut it down.
The CEO of that company refuses to shop at a black-owned store and blasts racist remarks across a personal blog web site that has nothing to do with his corp. Asshole. Might get his ass beat. Might make people not want to buy his company’s products. But not illegal.
Brilliant. I thought you were going to give me an example of some other right, but you had a great free speech example.
I still don't see an economic reason to overturn citizens united - like, if the legalisms about personhood don't add up, I'd still say courts and their gunmen aren't an effective mechanism for dealing with that kind of bribery.
No, corporations are contracts. They are pieces of paper. They have no natural rights under the law.
In the context of a bribe, a corporation is a person calling themselves a corporation. I don't see how the court can separate the brand name the person uses from the person committing the act of bribery.
In another context, like a bankruptcy trial, the corporation might be a piece of paper calling itself a person, having only the rights and accounntability of "corporate personhood" separate from the humans involved.
*accountability
They do separate, though. "Lifting the corporate veil" used to be limited to very rare circumstances, though the privileges are eroding.
That's how flunkies go to prison while managers, directors and shareholders are (mostly) free to do it again, barring unusual orders.
That's just it. Corporations are not people, because there are circumstances in the law that they beg to use in their defense that say that they are not. People can't pick and choose when to be considered a person and when not to be. So neither can corporations.
In the context of a bribe, it's not a corporation making the decision to sign the check, it's a person in some position of authority within that corporate structure. That person should be held accountable for that decision. Brand Names, Trademarks, those are all just contracts, information.
If people want to set up a DAO on some blockchain where "the code is the contract", then "shame on he who thinks ill". That's the pure form of "the corporation is just people with rules".
Corporations, ancient and modern, depended on the State to construct (and subsidise the defence of) the asymmetrical rights of shareholders against the Board, the Board against the managers, and the managers against the employees. Think of the thousands of pages of regulations, the dozens of state and federal agencies auditing and enforcing, and the court time required to enforce the status quo.
Without that structure and subsidies, the "Principal-Agent" problem would make corporations uncompetitive except in very niche situations. As they once were.
Citizens United was Treason. The 5 members of the US Supreme Court that voted for that decision should have been impeached and removed from office the next day.