Individuals, Corporations and Free Speech

Liberals ranging from Justice Stevens to politicians and media spin doctors are expressing outrage at the Supreme Court's majority opinion that will allow corporations to have a greater influence in elections. Freedom of speech applies to individuals, they tell us, but this right should be curtailed (under threat of government penalty) when it comes to impersonal corporations, which have no business shoveling out their millions of dollars to "buy" elections. But IIya Somin, writing for the blog The Volokh Conspiracy, offers a good answer to that particular charge:

It’s true, of course, that corporations “are not human beings.” But their owners (the stockholders) and employees are. Human beings organized as corporations shouldn’t have fewer constitutional rights than those organized as sole proprietors, partnerships, and so on. In this context, it’s important to emphasize that most media organizations and political activist groups also use the corporate form...most liberals accept the idea that organizational form is irrelevant when it comes to media corporations, which were exempt from the restrictions on other corporate speech struck down by the Court today. The Supreme Court (including its most liberal justices) has repeatedly recognized that media corporations have First Amendment rights just as broad as those extended to media owned by individuals. Yet the “corporations aren’t people” argument applies just as readily to media corporations as to others. After all, newspapers, radio stations, and TV stations “are not human beings” and they too “have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires.” We readily reject this reasoning in the case of media corporations because we recognize that even though the corporations in question are not people, their owners and employees are. The same point applies to other corporations.