The United States of Corporations

The Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. FEC offends me (I know this is not a lawyerly thing to say, but this turns my stomach) as it allows corporations to pour large amounts of money into elections by equating corporate spending to free speech. The best response I have seen is bellow form Umair Haque:

Dear Supreme Court,

I’m highly impressed with your recent decision to vaporize limits on corporate political spending. It’s the kind of campaign finance reform our ailing res publica needs. In fact, I found it so inspirational, here’s an even better idea.

Let’s give corporations the right to vote. One share, one vote. The logic? It’s simple. Corporations are people; all people are created equal; ergo, corporations must have equal rights — and no right is more important than the right to vote. (Well, maybe the right to buy fully automatic machine guns, but that’s another story).

Goldman Sachs, for example, has 514,080,000 shares outstanding — so they’d get 514 millon votes (in fact, maybe we should give them more, because they’re so smart). Ford has 3.31 billion shares outstanding, so they’d get approximately 2.8 billion more votes than Goldman.

I’ve discussed this with several other economists, and we all agree: it’s the most efficient solution. Why, it should save hundreds of millions in lobbying alone. Who needs K Street when corporations can simply, quickly, easily vote in the candidate of their choice? As a bonus, political scientists agree that the increasing polarization between left and right would quickly disappear, too. Human people — with their perpetual squabbling — would be simply outvoted by corporate people, who know what’s good for everyone.