Can Corporations Talk?
Jan 21st, 2010 by Micah Tillman | 3 Comments |
While we’re on the subject of ontologies in which groups are seen as things . . . .
The Supreme Court decided yesterday that corporations are allowed to talk about politics after all.
Well, actually, five members of the Supreme Court decided that yesterday.
Of course, the real question isn’t should corporations be allowed to talk about politics, but can corporations talk about politics.
And the answer, of course, is: “No, no they can’t.” Corporations don’t exist. They are legal fictions.
Every time you hear a corporation talk, take a second look. Look very carefully. If it’s noises you’re hearing, then some person is talking to you. If it’s words you’re reading, then some person or persons are writing to you.
Either way, it’s persons, not corporations, that are speaking.
Corporations don’t talk, any more than unicorns — or any other imaginary beasts — do.
I think the biggest problem is how people equare money to speech.
I can get money being something of an endorsement (you did a good job, here’s your paycheck). But, how far does it go?
If you vote in a way contrary to corporate interests (as designated by the voice of the Board of Directors and shareholders), do you suddenly stop getting paid and/or the company asks for the money back?
In my personal opinion, it is things like corporate interests that gives politicians the stereotype of being corrupt.
I think it’s worth noticing that sometimes we speak and think things that we know– strictly speaking– are false, and yet this oversimplification is somehow justified.
In electronics shematics, for example, the arrows drawn are not the directions the electrons move in, but the opposite direction. This fiction doesn’t play out as having any problems in the real world, so we stick with it.
When the Catholic Church was still denying Galileo et. al., they eventually gave sailors permission to navigate as if Galileo was right. The church had worked out this crazy model of motion that kept the Earth in the middle– but navigating according to this model was nearly impossible.
The church was of course knuckleheaded in it’s rejection of a much clearer and simpler model. But they were kind-of progressive, I think, in recognizing that sometimes we use a mental shorthand that we know to be untrue.
This all leads me to the question, is the “legal fiction” behind corporations a simple, useless lie, or is there something worth holding on to in the construct?
Seamus–
Excellent point about equating money and speech. Notice how people often talk about “freedom of expression” rather than “freedom of speech”? I’m not sure what the justification is for replacing “speech” with “expression” . . . .
Jeff C–
That is a great question too. If corporations are fictions — or shorthand ways of talking about how multiple people function together, or how individual persons speak or act on behalf of other persons — then hopefully people realize that’s what they are.
It’s fine to play (word) games, so long as everyone understands that a game is being played, and that we therefore shouldn’t take anything that happens in the game too seriously.
IMO, corporations are fictions whose function is to give people an excuse for not taking responsibility for their actions. A person kills someone by spilling toxic waste an a bunch of baby penguins, but it’s not his/her fault — the “corporation” is responsible.
I hear these advertisements on the radio saying you should incorporate your business in order to protect your personal assets (and to protect yourself from lawsuits by your customers or something). I’ve also heard that corporations were invented to encourage entrepreneurs to take risks they wouldn’t otherwise take, since the fiction provides them with certain protections if they fail which they wouldn’t have if they didn’t incorporate.
Remember when Rosie O’Donnell and Donald Trump got into an argument about whether he had ever gone bankrupt — she said he had, evidently, and he threatened to sue her for defamation [or something like that] because he said he hadn’t — some of his companies had, but not him?
Anyhoo, yeah. So I think that the fiction of corporations is dangerous.