[spindritf]

> 2. Corporations are people. (In the US)

I could never understand that point. Corporations are people everywhere. Corporation is just a group of people (shareholders/owners and management/employees) with a contractual hierarchy owning some property (equity). Same way NGOs are people, HOAs are people, football teams are people... And it's like that everywhere in the world, it's a very basic property of human societies.

That's why corporate donations traditionally include donations from "members" of the corporation as donation from the corporation BTW.

Now, in civilized countries, individuals within these groups are given some legal protection from responsibility for the group's actions. There are certain advantages to that approach (more innovation, risk taking, investment, etc) but most importantly collective responsibility is simply wrong.

[Tangaroa]

The idea of corporations being people goes back to Rome when someone decided that the laws regarding disputes between persons could be applied to an organization as well. Corpus == body, the body of people being treated as a person in considering the accusation. That said, governments have always been able to regulate what corporations can do until the Citizens United decision of 2010. Corporations used to be chartered by the government to meet a specific objective and were only allowed to spend money towards that objective; government regulatory policy was deny-by-default. Aaron Burr's Manhattan Company in 1799 was the first modern corporation in the US that was allowed to spend its money freely.