In an Iowa campaign appearance today, Mitt Romney defended his corporatist politics with the claim that "Corporations are people, my friend."
Romney is half right, and his statement is superficially plausible. After all, corporations are a way to organize people into groups, and the money they allocate eventually does go to people, as Romney claims.
However, groups of people are not the same as individuals. Ultimately, the experience of life is at the individual level. Hope, fear, love, hunger, and pain, for example, are all experienced by individuals as individuals, and even in groups every individual's experience is more or less different.
The interests of the group and the individual are never perfectly aligned, even in the most harmonious group, whether a corporation or a family. There are invariably individual interests which diverge from or conflict with the group. In a successful group, those interests are either subordinated to the group or accommodated by it, and in any case are outweighed by common interests.
Unlike many societies, America has always been premised on the idea that individual rights are paramount, that government should flow from the will of individuals, and that individual liberty should be constrained as little as possible. It is why we have a Bill of Rights.
Corporations, as a means of social organization, are hierarchical and autocratic. In the interests of fostering initiative and creativity, they may be benevolent dictatorships, but they are dictatorships nonetheless. And dictatorships tend to favor most the welfare of the dictators, although they must provide enough benefit to the other members of the organization to retain their loyalty and their services. We may tolerate this as a system of incentives, but that does not mean that it is a good basis for a fair and just social polity.
And while corporations are groups of people, they are more than that. They represent a system of organizing capital to create wealth. This single-minded priority is the most salient difference between corporations and people (as my old law school professor Lawrence Mitchell has pointed out many times). People have multiple priorities, but corporations have only one, the acquisition of money. They are therefore indifferent to considerations of kindness, humanity, or aesthetics, except insofar as any one of these things may affect the bottom line. It is so evident that corporations do not behave the way individuals do that it almost seems ludicrous to point it out.
Unfortunately, despite corporations' single-minded and often antisocial behavior, the Supreme Court has repeatedly decided these aggregations of capital (including human capital) should be accorded the same rights as people. In a political sense, corporations are (and hopefully always will be) deficient in one key respect: they cannot vote. Only individual citizens can do that. But why should we stop there? If corporations are organizations of capital that cannot and should not be citizens, why should they be accorded any rights at all, or at most minimal privileges necessary to do business?