Sunday, August 21, 2011

City of Aurora, CO Proposes Giving Corporation Right to Vote | Move to Amend

City of Aurora, CO Proposes Giving Corporation Right to Vote | Move to Amend
And...the Libertarian Party is opposing it!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

"The Libertarian Party of Colorado stands firm against corporations voting in elections. "Giving a corporation the right to vote is really a form of fascism. If we allow corporations to vote, there will be nothing to stop corporations from buying and influencing any elections that they choose." said Rob McNealy, Media Director of the Libertarian Party of Colorado."

Is Move To Amend a parody news site, like The Onion?

If not, aren't they aware of 1 U.S.C. §1 (United States Code), which states:

In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, unless the context indicates otherwise-- the words "person" and "whoever" include corporations, companies, associations, firms, partnerships, societies, and joint stock companies, as well as individuals

For far too long, corporations have been suffering taxation without representation.

Voting rights for corporations will be this generation's civil rights struggle. And the libertarians, as usual, will be on the wrong side of history.

Anonymous said...

Corporations have no social duty
Except to those who own their stock

Corporations are amoral
Corporate conscience is impossible
The corporation really has no choice
...
So if you want your freedom
Let the corporate seize the day
There really is no better way


-The Milton Friedman Choir

Conservatives, libertarians, and Ayn Randians celebrate corporations as a thing of beauty
because they have no moral obligations to anyone other than their shareholders.

In what other context would a conservative accept a "I'm not responsible for my amoral actions because I really have no choice" excuse?

Clinically speaking, corporations are sociopaths. Not that they necessarily behave in an evil manner (although many do), but that they have no sense of empathy or morality toward others that most of us possess. Concentrating wealth and power into the hands of sociopaths can't be a good thing.

Nick Wilson, co-founder of the Libertarian Reform Caucus, wrote back in 2008 that

"Like our intellectual forerunners, the classical liberals, we should have always been attacking corporations and monopolies as perversions of free markets. Corporations are government-created statuses that prevent the owners and managers from being liable and financially accountable for actions taken on behalf of the corporation. Adam Smith hated corporations as unaccountable and inefficient, and saw them as government market distortions. We should too."

While I'm not going to endorse the LRC because I'm not familiar enough with them, my experience with my HOA has made me realize that conservative/libertarian dogma about things like "contracts" and "corporations" is just plain wrong, and that the political Right needs to do some serious thinking about these subjects. For example, does a contract between two individual persons carry the same moral authority as some document called a contract between an individual person and a sociopathic corporation?

Libertarian writer Radley Balko believes that government crackdowns on lemonade stands are "creating new little libertarians". Maybe, maybe not. I don't know.

But if so, the same heavy handed tactics, when exercised by an HOA corporation, surely cannot be helping the libertarian cause. This is something that libertarians seem to be oblivious to, because they are as clueless about the real-world consequences of their socio-economic-political theories as your typical college campus leftist wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt driving around in a Prius sporting a "Hope and Change" bumper sticker.

Notice that all the libertarian sites promoting "Lemonade Freedom Day" civil disobedience are not suggesting that parents urge their children to defy their HOA -- only "police and other government workers."

www.lemonadefreedom.com/?s=HOA
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Telling people who are being abused that they consented to be abused will only work for so long before they start looking for their rights elsewhere.

Anonymous said...

"looking for their rights"?

They will not be found laying around. You have to assert them or re-establish them. Since oppression is quite lucrative for the oppressor, "please" isn't going to cut it for re-establishing and enforcing the rights of the oppressed.