One of the Occupy Wall Street slogans was “corporations are not people.” But what does this mean? People have a variety of rights, including the right to sign (and be obligated by) contracts, the right to free speech, and the right to vote. When the Supreme Court decided that corporations are persons (as it did in 1819), the court meant that corporations have some of these rights (such as the right to sign contracts), but not others (such as the right to vote, which is reserved to “citizens,” not “people”).
When Mitt Romney said, “Corporations are people, my friend,” he didn’t mean it in a legal sense but in the sense that corporations are made up of people and corporate profits eventually end up in the hands of at least some of those people.
The question is: where do we draw the line? If we deny corporations the right to contract, then corporations could not exist, as the whole point of corporations is for investors and managers to contract with one another. While some may think eliminating corporations is a good idea, without corporations most goods would be a lot more expensive and it is likely that wealth would be even more concentrated in the hands of a few because only those with wealth would be able to invest in productive activities that could return large profits.
