Political donations from corporations either are, or aren’t, effective.
If they don’t work, they should be banned by shareholders. You shouldn’t spend shareholder money for no gain.
If they do work, they should be banned by society.
As political donations undoubtedly work, political donations from corporations should be banned.
Despite nutty Supreme Court rulings, money isn’t speech, and political contributions aren’t speech.
Despite nutty Supreme Court rulings, corporations aren’t people. They are legal entities, and they have whatever rights and restrictions we give them as a condition of their existence. Political contribtuions is a right we shouldn’t give them.
I don’t see the nuance. IMO, none of those objections are difficult to overcome. Sid can still contribute whatever he wants for whatever reason, subject to the normal limits of political contribution. Sid’s company can’t. If Sid’s company funnels profits to Sid, that’s fine. Sid is an actual human being and US citizen, the company isn’t. The goal isn’t to get Sid’s money out of politics, the goal is to limit it to non-corporations.
Mark Zuckerberg can give, Meta can’t. Alex Taylor can give, Cox Enterprises can’t. The Truett family can give, ChickFilA can’t. In all cases, we’d be better off to leave political contributions to biological humans rather than fictitious legal entities. Theodore Roosevelt was right.
I agree with this, but it’s more complex and nuanced than you make it out to be. Let’s say we ban it. Well, I have my own company….it makes good money. It would be in both my corporate and personal best interest for it to make more money. Let’s say I’d like to support policies that let it make more money….and that’s banned.
Well, if direct contributions are banned, I can just pay a dividend to the one shareholder, ME, pay for whatever I want politically, and the result is substantially the same. I guess the only thing is that that money would be taxed first?
MOST corporations in this country are closely held. You could say, fine…public companies can’t do it then. Well, then they just go private if the issues are big enough and they don’t need active access to public capital markets. And then you really lose any transparency.
Anyway, I agree with the sentiment, and think it comes from a good place. From a practical standpoint, however, it’s probably difficult to come up with a system that has no workaround unless you also ban PACs and really cap personal donations.