Houses are People

When you warm a house, you also warm the people inside.

If a house burns down, the people inside burn too.

If you damage a house, the people who own it pay.

Ergo, houses ARE people. Clearly.

Corporations are legal structure. A house is a physical structure. Corporations bring capital together in a common purpose and shelter individuals from liability. Houses bring people together in a home and shelter us from the elements.

Of course what we do to a corporation affects the people involved in the corporation. That is true of virtually anything in this world. But, the reality is that we recognize that vessels and structures are not, in and of themselves, people.

It would be possible to simply say that taxes on corporations are paid by people. It is similar to the argument advanced for years that taxes on merchants are paid by customers. That argument never needed to become a claim that "merchants are customers." But, the "corporations are people" argument must go further. It is because this assertion is not a simple analogy for the purposes of election politics, it is about extending to corporations fundamental rights granted to people under the law.

It isn't the same as arguing that I can put a political poster on my house because I have a right to political speech. It is saying that the house itself possesses this right. It's a fine, but highly dangerous distinction. It is a distinction that allows corporations to speak and act with the rights of a person, but keeps the wealthy individuals behind the corporation's walls sheltered and separate. It is a distinction that is not missed by highly educated, very wealthy individuals like Romney.

Thought of the Day

Is the United States more litigious than Europe because we have traditionally lacked the same social safety net?

Conservatives complain about both our sue happy culture (until they want to bring a suit), and the idea of providing extensive social safety nets. When thinking about it today I realized that the two might be structurally related.

A lot of the ideas about liability in tort law lie in a philosophy similar to the idea of the 'lowest cost avoider.' This theory says, for example, that the producer of a dangerous product is in a better position to consider the costs and benefits of adding safety devices to the product, and that economic efficiency in this respect can be reached if the producer pays for all harm caused by the product.

In the general tort context I think of it as the 'someone has to pay' principle. When there is a harm, someone has to pay for it, that's a given. The tort system just decides *who* pays. If I slip and fall in the grocery store, and get $50,000 of harm (medical and lost working time), then that harm exists in and of itself. The tort system now decides who should pay.

On justification for the tort system in this case is that the grocery store is in the best position to know how many slip and falls happen, and how many resources to invest in avoiding them. If they bear all the costs, we should reach an efficient level of slip prevention. The counter point is that it removes my incentive to not slip.

A large part of the tort system is that sometimes it just feels unfair to make an individual bear certain burdens. We have all heard about huge jury awards in personal injury cases.

It seems possible that this sense of 'unfairness' is born from our lack of social safety net. A slip and fall in a grocery store could go from bad, to devastating if I don't have health insurance, a medical leave policy, unemployment pay, food for my family, etc. So in the United States our tort system might have developed more robustly than other developed countries in an attempt to spread the cost of risk among a larger pool of people.

Europe doesn't have the same high level of personal injury lawsuits. But, they already spread the risk by provided tax funded safety nets for individuals who are hit by difficult circumstances.

Rape by deception

This story is interesting from a lot of angles: http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2010/07/21/trust-but-verify

At first I really didn't like the idea of rape by deception. It seems like a dangerous slippery slope. I decided that a solid legal standard would be if the perpetrator tells a lie that s/he knows or should know will be a critical factor in the granting of consent. That's a fairly high standard, but we're talking about criminal law, if anything it felt potentially too low. We laugh at characters like Barney on How I Met Your Mother, when he lies his way into a girl's bedroom. Do we want to send him to jail?

Upon further consideration I've realized this is an odd social programming. There is a crime called 'larceny by trick.' If I lie to you in order to convince you to give me your stuff, I've committed a crime. If I lie to you to get you to consent to sexual activity, no crime. Shouldn't our sexually repressed culture be more concerned about chastity than things? I think I'll have to reconsider what is a fairly patriarchal view that boys lying and tricking their way to sex is just boys being boys.