I am working on an essay which lays out the facts of "corporate personhood" and have gotten to the place where I explain how "corporate persons" differ from "natural people".
I have tried to be exhaustive in my list, but I am sure I have missed a few diferences. Any suggestions are appreciated.
In 1882 Santa Clara County, California got into a tax dispute with the Southern Pacific Railroad over fences. The county saw fences along railroad lines as an “improvement”, which raised the value of the land, and wanted to tax the railroad accordingly. The Southern Pacific Railroad disagreed, and refused to pay the tax.
The California Supreme Court backed Santa Clara, and the matter was appealed to the Supreme Court in 1886.
The Southern Pacific Railroad argued that corporations were “people” as regards the “equal protection” clause of the 14th Amendment which states:
deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
While the Supreme Court did rule for the railroad, it did so on the basis of the minutiae of California tax law, and never mentioned the 14th Amendment directly.
If these positions are tenable, there will be no occasion to consider the grave questions of constitutional law upon which the case was determined below; for, in that event, the judgment can be affirmed upon the ground that the assessment cannot properly be the basis of a judgment against the defendant.
In essence, the Supreme Court said, “The railroad raised an interesting question about whether a corporation should be treated as a real “person”, but since we tossed out the case on more mundane grounds, we aren’t going to answer that question.
Had things been left as they were, this would have been just a boring little case that law students wanting to be tax lawyers would get on a test.
Except that before the arguments on the case started Chief Justice Morrison Waite spouted off that:
"The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does."
Of course, since the statement was made before arguments had even begun, the statement itself was never argued. In essence, Justice Waite decided the issue unilaterally. The other justices may have agreed with him, but as the issue was not argued before the court, and a specific ruling handed down explaining this view, the statement was a highly dubious departure from the practice of the court dating back to Marbury v. Madison.
When asked about the statement by the court reporter, Bancroft Davis, Waite stated that he thought the statement accurate, but since the question of corporate personhood was not actually decided by the Court, he left it to Davis’ discretion whether or not to include it in the headnotes of the case. Davis, a former railroad director, decided it was and did.
Since headnotes are the summary of a case that other judges read to determine how they should rule, the concept that “corporations are people” became the law of the land without ever being argued before the court and justified legally.
Only in the logic of the law can such an absurd concept as “corporate personhood” be considered rational.
Corporations are functionally immortal, people are not. Even in the rare instances a corporation does die (goes bankrupt), corporations can re-incarnate, people cannot.
While Texas executed over 200 people in the last decade, it has yet to execute a single corporation. In fact, corporate execution (by revocation of corporate charter) had pretty much disappeared in the last 80 years.
Corporations cannot suffer, only make the people who work for them suffer, or make the environment suffer. This causes people beyond the direct control of a corporation to suffer.
Corporations do not fight or die in wars, people do. Corporations just make money on the death and destruction that wars cause. In fact, some corporations encourage wars, because they sell the instruments of death and destruction.
Corporations cannot be punished, only people can. Any sanction against a corporation is ultimately born by real people.
Corporations do not go to prison, people do. Corporations can make money off prisons and prisoners, by running the former, and exploiting the latter. Allowing corporations to run prisons creates a vile incentive to push for irrational laws with draconian punishments. Since prisoners in a corporate prison are “assets” that generate “revenue”, the more prisoners a prison has and the longer they stay, the more money it makes. Thus, prison corporations will influence congress to criminalize more acts, and punish them more harshly. Prison corporations will always oppose the decriminalization of any act which would lower the prison population, or lessen sentences (see marijuana).
While in a metaphorical sense, corporations can get sick, and even die, the misery is not suffered by the corporation, but by the people who compose it. Even then, the management responsible for the sickness and death are rarely included in the suffering and usually find another “host” to support their parasitical existence.
A public servant works for the public, a corporation works for itself. Therefore any public service turned over to a corporation with either cost the public more to administer, or reduce the service provided.
Corporations have but one god, money; their only prophets are profits; and their only commandment is, “Maximize shareholder value”.
Corporations cannot feel shame or empathy, thus have no social constraint on their actions. As long as they make money and obey the letter of the law (at least while people are looking), no action(s), no matter how detrimental to the public, the country, or the planet, is constrained by decency or compassion. When real human beings act this way, we call them “sociopaths”, and they are either medicated, restrained, imprisoned or executed.
Corporations enjoy hundreds of tax credits, rebates and deductions that people do not. They can use their fiscal resource to create more such benefits, and stave off attempts to repeal any of those benefits; people, except for the rare few possessed of cash on par with a corporation, cannot.
When a group of people conspires and executes a plan to kill 3,000 other people, they are branded “terrorists”, and the entire country’s police and military resources are employed to capture/punish these people. But when an industry (a group of corporate people, say the meat processing industry) kills 3,000 people (and poisons 128,000 more) they suffer negligible fines, and the rare indictment criminal indictment. Now some will argue that the first group INTENTIONALLY killed people while the second group did not. If this argument is made, it begs the question: “How many times can you “unintentionally” kill 3,000 people a year, before folks see it as intentional?”
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