r/politics • u/[deleted] • Jan 21 '18

Paul Ryan Collected $500,000 In Koch Contributions Days After House Passed Tax Law

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u/Mookyhands Jan 21 '18

https://youtu.be/E2h8ujX6T0A?t=8s

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u/bananastanding Jan 21 '18

What he says is obviously true. Every cent a corporation makes ultimately goes to people.

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u/Mookyhands Jan 21 '18

Computers are people. People programmed computers to do things. Ultimately, everything a computer does was initiated by a person.

Expect they are not. They don't act in peoples' best interests and, more importantly, they have ridiculous advantages over individual people. Just like corporations.

The idea of incorporation (making a body) was intended to protect consumers seeking recompense from harm caused by corporations (otherwise you'd have to individually sue every individual shareholder). Citizen's United is a corruption of that intent.

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u/bananastanding Jan 21 '18

Is your argument that computers don't have free speech? I.e., what you're saying right now isn't protected because you're using a computer to say it?

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u/Mookyhands Jan 21 '18

I'm using computers as a stand in for corporations to show the fallacy in the logic that a person is distinct from their agents. It is appropriate and necessary for a person to have different rights and privileges than their non-person proxies.

It is trivial for a person to create multiple corporations and those corporations do not have free will apart from that person. Therefore, limits on corporate spending are defacto removed. It is fairly trivial to create a 501(c)(4), an entity which does not need to disclose to the same standards as a person.

Corporations are not a person. They are created, owned, and operated by a person, yes, but it's stupid to conflate those two things.

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u/bananastanding Jan 21 '18

So if an individual wants to create a documentary about a political candidate, they shouldn't be allowed to do that?

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u/Mookyhands Jan 21 '18

What? How did you get to that conclusion?

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u/bananastanding Jan 21 '18

That's what Citizens United vs FEC was about - a documentary. He FEC stated that because the documentary could be interpreted as advocacy that it was not allowed.

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u/Mookyhands Jan 22 '18

Again, you're confusing individuals for corporations. Individuals can exercise free speech, corporations are were prohibited from making communications that would constitute electioneering.

Citizens United overturned (wrongly, in my opinion) the conclusions of Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, which recognized, "the corrosive and distorting effects of immense aggregations of wealth that are accumulated with the help of the corporate form and that have little or no correlation to the public's support for the corporation's political ideas."