Corporations are not people. Anyone with common sense can see they’re not. It’s one of those truths that should have been self-evident, until lawyers got involved.
The 2010 Citizens United decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled that corporations have the right to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections, has led to public outrage. Two years later, it’s clear that the newly blessed corporate “right” is not having a healthy effect on our democracy.
But Citizens United didn’t come out of nowhere. Some would argue that the ruling was a logical next step on a path we started down more than a century ago. Maybe I’ll say more about that in a future post. Just now, I prefer to meditate on how a corporation is not like a person.
First, a caveat. For purposes of this discussion, “corporation” doesn’t mean a non-profit group like the Humane Society or the Sierra Club. It doesn’t mean my grandfather’s business, which was a corporation with all shares held by family members. I’m referring here to for-profit corporations that trade on the public stock market.
By law, such a corporation has only one purpose: to make money for its shareholders. And that’s the first thing that makes it different from a real person.
Sure, people like money. Some of us like it a lot, and do a great deal of sweating and scheming to acquire more of it. But ultimately, money is only good for what it can buy. What we really want is food, clothing, security, cars, IPhones, a nice place to live, cool vacations, a big-screen TV and an education for our kids so they can earn money to buy their own stuff when they grow up. Some people use money to gain power and status, bend others to their will, or hire goons to beat up people they don’t like. Whatever a person chooses to do with it, money is chiefly a means to an end.
For a corporation, money is the end and everything else is a means. Anything it does -- bringing jobs to a community, putting out a good or lousy product, making snazzy Super Bowl commercials, buying off politicians, even donating to a worthy cause -- is in service of its real purpose. If those incidental activities don’t pay off (i.e., lead to increased profits), then the corporation will find a way to do without them.
Point two: People are living, breathing organisms. As such, we need clean air, clean water, and food that will nourish our bodies. A corporation doesn’t need those things. It eats only money.
For a person, being alive has a flip side; it means he’s going to die someday. A corporation, on the other hand, is theoretically immortal. It may have a human CEO and board of directors, but those individuals can be replaced. Shareholders come and go as people trade in the market. If a shareholder dies, his stock becomes part of his estate and passes to his heirs. And the corporation goes on.
Point three: A corporation has no conscience, and has no soul.
A wise friend explained this to me one day. We were discussing our investments. Yes, I own stock in corporations, and I’m choosy about where I invest. I try to pick companies that don’t pollute, treat employees decently, and produce things that make the world a better place. I don’t want to believe that corporations are, by their very nature, immoral.
“Not immoral. Amoral,” my friend said. “Morality is outside their frame of reference. An entity can’t be moral or immoral if it hasn’t got a soul.”
I bet I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking of real, live people you’ve met who appear to have no conscience, already have more money than you could ever figure out how to spend, and are willing to do egregiously unethical things to get more. You’re wondering if corporations are really so different from people after all.
Hold that thought. I’ll come back to it in a moment.
When I first started pondering the morality of corporations. I thought about sharks. A shark, I suspect, doesn’t spend energy worrying about right and wrong. It’s just a fish with big teeth and a taste for blood, swimming through the ocean and devouring any critter that looks good to eat. A corporation, I thought, is like that.
But sharks have a place in the ecosystem, and there are checks and balances in nature that keep predators from wiping out the competition. If you’re among those who believe that God created the earth and everything in it, then God created sharks. I trust He knew what He was doing.
God did not create corporations. People did. Funny thing ... our myths and literature are full of cautionary tales about persons who have taken it upon themselves to create some kind of pseudo-life form and had it not go well at all. Frankenstein’s monster comes to mind. The Jewish legend of the golem. The goblins in Dean Koontz’s creepy novel Twilight Eyes. Somebody dreams up a creature that’s stronger, faster, or more devious, intending to use it as a tool, a servant, a weapon. Instead, the thing turns on its creator and the whole human race.
I think we’re living that story now.
Last Sunday, I saw a piece in the Wall Street Journal about the people who work on Wall Street, and how a surprisingly high percentage are psychopaths or sociopaths. One person quoted in the article said you really sort of have to be one to succeed in that world. Another described a sociopath as “a person with no conscience.” (italics mine)
When you give corporations the same status and rights as people, maybe it’s inevitable that your society will cultivate people who think like corporations.
We’ve created a monster, and now the monster is us.
