This kind of corruption in the case of the USA seems quite simple to solve. You've made it legal to buy politicians, how about changing that back? It's a start...
How do you propose to do it? Limit contributions by corporations? I don't see the distinction, corporations are people, I can become a one man corporation by clicking a few buttons.
Money like code, is ultimately speech. I'll take that any day over the alternative limitations as long as we have legit voting and non-forced spending of money.
Please don't take HN threads further into generic ideological tangents. They're all more or less the same, which means they contain no new information, which means we don't learn from them, which means they're not interesting in HN's sense of "gratifying intellectual curiosity" (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), which means they're roundly off topic here.
What makes HN topics and discussions interesting are the diffs from other topics and discussions. Therefore the generic is what we're most trying to avoid.
that may be an accepted legal viewpoint in the USA but it is not the truth
> I can become a one man corporation
In truth you can't, because you will still be a person. Its just that in addition there will be a corporation consisting solely of one person. You may notice that when you incorporate, the corporation does not get a vote and neither does your vote get removed. You may notice that you can incorporate several times and this still does not affect your status as a person.
"corporation does not get a vote and neither does your vote get removed"
Exactly. It's pretty hard to argue being a corporation is somehow special, our courts correctly recognized that. I agree with your second paragraph completely.
Without corporate personhood, how do I sue a company for a harm it did to me? I can't prove the CEO, the human being who does administrative jobs, did the harm, and I certainly can't prove any other employee did, either, so who do I sue? Do I try to sue everyone from the board on down to the janitor? That kinda screws the janitor, to be named in a suit for something the low-level employees had no control over.
If the law says you can sue a company, then you can sue a company. There is no reason why a company has to be a person for this to occur.
In fact, I'm looking at the federal rules of US civil procedure right now, and they say nothing about 'personhood' being required to take action. They say "A civil action is commenced by filing a complaint with the court" and it has a specific section called "SERVING A CORPORATION, PARTNERSHIP, OR ASSOCIATION" and it goes on and on about officers, general agents, representing attorneys, and other such appointed persons who will become involved in such a case.
So perhaps you should actually take a look at the law before you accuse others of ignorance.
Not really, no. It's frequently gerrymandered and considerable effort is put into making it harder for some people to vote than others. The count is probably legitimate, except where questionable machine voting systems are in place.
I agree that ideological talking points like "money is speech" are a poor fit for substantive discussion, but you made the thread still worse by crossing into name-calling and being personally abrasive. Would you please re-read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and not do those things here?
If there is a legit distinction between speech and conversations, you didn't make it or I missed it.
I could start throwing labels about your POV, but that would be a good indication that I don't have a real point to make.
Saying corporations are different because they have buying power that people don't have is incorrect. There are plenty of people that can and do vastly outspend most corporations. They do this by making many corporations and using those to socially engineer the target population instead of contributing directly (this is why money is speech). It also ignores the point that corporations are made of people, and people have one vote. Politicians that do what a small group wants (a corp) vs their larger constituency get voted out (Cantored' in recent US lingo).
> you already convinced me that you're not in good faith
We're irreconcilably opposed, but I have no doubt that everyone on this thread is advocating their true thoughts. Please reconsider this mode of argumentation in the future.
> We're irreconcilably opposed, but I have no doubt that everyone on this thread is advocating their true thoughts. Please reconsider this mode of argumentation in the future.
When I say "I think you're not in good faith", obviously that's not an argument for anything. Take it as a justification of why I'm convinced that continuing won't get us anywhere and therefore not worth the effort.
And by the way... when I said that I was referring to someone else; I haven't been following what you've been saying.
Clumsy phrasing on my part. I meant that collectively, the participants in this thread are irreconcilably opposed. You and I seem to be roughly aligned.
I'm horrified by jakeogh and the unfettering of corporate monsters to gobble up little people; I expect he would be similarly horrified by me for contemplating having the state rein them in.
I'd like to think there's a middle ground where we all deplore and distrust the concentration of power in either public OR private hands, but past experience in debates like this leads me to believe that's unlikely.
I even gave the mechanism, you can use money to generate speech. I don't think you are commenting in bad faith, and I don't think talking to you is a waste of time.
