Killing Corporations

The movement to revoke corporate charters has gotten its history confused

Jesse Walker from the July 2001 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

But that’s almost beside the point. The goal of the revocation movement isn’t to stop privilege or to end corporate welfare. It’s to tighten the state’s control of business life. Grossman and the rest don’t focus their fire on general incorporation laws. Their favorite target is Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, the Supreme Court decision that ruled that corporations are individuals and therefore protected under the 14th Amendment. The precedent allowed scores of state and municipal statutes to be struck down as unconstitutional, from local taxes on railroad property to restrictions on working hours.

Among those who’ve taken up this cause are the leftist columnists Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman, who cited the case earlier this year while complaining that corporations enjoy rights to free speech (“including the tobacco companies’ right to market their deadly wares”) and to protection from unreasonable search and seizure. In other words, they are not complaining about special privileges. They are complaining about ordinary freedoms. One need not believe that a corporation “is” a person to recognize that it is made up of persons, and that those people should not give up their rights when they associate to form a corporation. If the groups known as “unions,” “churches,” and “political parties” are protected by the Bill of Rights, then so are the groups known as “corporations.” Deny this, and you run into a host of practical problems. (If Mokhiber and Weissman really think corporations shouldn’t enjoy the same First Amendment freedoms as the rest of us, what do they think should happen to the corporation that publishes The New York Times?)

As I said, the revocation movement doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere, at least so far as affecting public policy is concerned. It is, however, increasingly popular on the modern left, including not just tobacco-bashers and the like but those lefties who sometimes seem to care about decentralizing power, ending political privilege, and protecting individual liberty. (Gross-man and Adams, for instance, are skeptical about regulatory agencies, and at times they even seem interested in states’ rights.) It is disheartening to see such people supporting censorship or ignoring due process merely because a corporation is involved. It is even more disheartening to see them chasing such chimeras when the real grants of privilege—the subsidies and entry barriers—are sitting in plain sight.

But what’s worse is when someone hoping to ban cigarettes or censor issue ads adopts the rhetoric of men who would treat such causes with contempt. Language and history shouldn’t have to suffer such abuses.