Ron Paul Breaks With Mitt Romney: ‘People Are Individuals…Not Companies’
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/08/15/295646/ron-paul-mitt-romney-corporations-people/
KEYES: What did you make of Mitt Romney’s statement that “corporations are people” yesterday?
PAUL: Obviously they’re not. People are individuals, they’re not groups and they’re not companies. Individuals have rights, they’re not collective. You can’t duck that. So individuals should be responsible for corporations, but they shouldn’t be a new creature, so to speak. Rights and obligations should be always back to the individual.
If Mitt Romney fails to win the White House, it likely will be because of five words:
“Corporations are people, my friend.”
Romney uttered those now-infamous words while campaigning Aug. 11 at the Iowa State Fair. He was engaging with some hecklers about his unwillingness to raise taxes on people. When the hecklers yelled back that corporations should be taxed more, that’s when Romney said the words that reverberated around the Internet.
Romney tried to explain further, that money that corporations control ultimately goes to the people who work for them. The explanation brought hollow laughter from the hecklers — who were identified as liberal activists (who are also people, despite what you’ve heard from Fox News).
This fine point was completely lost, though, as the five words took on their own life.
Romney’s GOP rival Ron Paul responded that “people are individuals, they’re not groups and they’re not companies.” Meanwhile, jokes abounded on Twitter, a thousand sarcastic questions about whether corporations could marry in Massachusetts or whether Soylent Green is a corporation (following the logic that if corporations are people, and Soylent Green is people, ergo …).
But Romney’s fateful five words — beyond demonstrating that his Guy Smiley man-of-the-people campaign persona is a thin veneer covering an affection toward corporations, and showing that Romney is really bad at off-the-cuff campaigning without talking points or a TelePrompTer — raise two important questions: Are corporations people? And, if so, what kind of people are they?
The U.S. Constitution, which sets forth the rules by which government is supposed to abide, never mentions the word “corporation.” (Take that, Tea Partiers!) It took the Supreme Court, in the 1819 case Dartmouth College v. Woodward, to declare that corporations had the same right to enter into contracts — and have those contracts honored — as natural persons. This idea was expanded in 1886, in the case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, in which the court ruled that the equal-protection clause of the 14th Amendment protected corporations the same way it did people.
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