A judge in Delaware—a state with more registered business entities than people—ruled Monday in favor of a small town that allows corporations to vote in local elections.
…
“What is a ‘person?’ When one cuts to the heart of this case, that is the question,” Karsnitz wrote to open his 20-page ruling.
Ok well now I need to go smash a bunch of fragile furniture with a sledgehammer while screaming in primal rage to cool down a bit from reading that. Worf, I could use a friend right now to join me in this ritual.
Corporations are people is sometimes a useful abstraction. However like many analogies taking it to the extreme is wrong.
Capitalism and mainstream economics are sometimes useful abstractions but I think they have had their time and chance to prove their usefulness and relevance to the material improvement of quality of life for the average person and have decisively failed.
Is, and always has been a strawman invented by Marx. It is sometimes a useful abstraction, but in the real world we are “classical liberal” - we stand for freedom to do what you want. (with limits, but we try to minimize those limits). Capitalism is sometimes a result of that, but remember it is a result and exists only because you can’t kill the result without killing the rest of the freedom message.
Sadly not many people are true liberals anymore. Most of gets that label doesn’t believe in liberalism.
(Not a lawyer, just someone who has to stick their noses in laws way more than I care for) In Germany we have two sorts of persons defined in law: juristic persons and natural persons. There are lots of rights only natural persons have, like voting. Juristic persons are a legal invention to enable organisations like corporations to take a side in contracts and similar stuff.
Sometimes it seems good to live somewhere where nerds thought of regulating this kind of thing way ahead of time. Current tradition has them since 1900. A Google search just told me though that this construct was part of Roman law (makes sense, German civil war is modelled on the French Code Civil which was modelled on Roman law…).