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Does it make any sense to treat corporations as "persons", given the differences in incentives structures?

 

Well, one may well argue that, if BP were a person, it would be “a career criminal”, but surely not all corporations behave in a criminal matter.

Nevertheless, I think we all recognize that although corporations are owned, managed and staffed by real people, the incentives that people in such organizations face and their consequent collective behavior – what we call the behavior of “the corporation” – may differ quite markedly from those of ordinary, living and breathing humans who live in communities, and from people in groups that do not have limited liability (a feature that underlies the pervasive and increasingly enormous and costly  “moral hazard” problems that our society now confronts), unlimited life and purposes, other favors granted by the state, which have less political power, and for which the “principal-agent problem” is less severe.

So does it make any sense to treat “corporations” under the law – or for purposes of discussions on LvMI pages – as if they have the same rights as real persons?

Allow me to refer to a post I did in wake of the recent Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court : Speech and Sociopaths: Does it make sense to collapse, for Constitutional and legal purposes, the distinctions between human beings and corporate “persons”?

My other posts on the Citizens United decision are here.

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