On the video page featuring Mitt Romney’s notorious “corporations are people” comment — the one I clicked to, anyway — every comment was negative, with jokes like “Did you hear that S&P downgraded the Tea Party credit grade to KK+?” and economically illiterate whoppers like “Corporations do not help anyone except those who own them or do what they say.” It’s saddening to see ignorance and bigotry so self-righteously maintained by everyday Americans.
Yes, bigotry.
For Romney was right: Corporations are made of people. Those who roil with hatred for corporations, singling them out for more regulation or greater taxation, are attacking actual living, breathing people, who, as Milton Friedman pointed out, are made up of three classes of just plain folks: the owners, the shareholders, who are people; the corporation’s hired workers and managers, who are people; and served customers, that is, people who have chosen, sans duress, to buy stuff from the corporations.
Economist Steven Horwitz, writing in the Buffalo News, cited one study that estimated that “45 percent to 75 percent of the burden of a corporate tax increase is borne by workers,” and noted that, if profits fall, fewer dividends would go to stockholders.
And “stockholders” are often nothing other than workers’ retirement funds.
Yeah, soak the older people. That should make corporation-haters feel good.
Setting aside “some other people” to hate is exactly what anti-corporatists are doing. It’s bigotry. And it’s ugly … and de-humanizing.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
6 replies on “Greed and Bigotry on the Campaign Trail”
If I may be so bold as to interject, please do not refer to Americans as ‘workers.’ We are not mere units of labor to be exploited by parasites that have been infected with socialism. Americans are employees. We own our labor and we reserve the right to sell that labor.
Corporate welfare should be ended, and corporations should not have automatic limited liability (they should be free to negotiate limited liability contract-by-contract).
Jeff Daiell
Setting aside some other people to hate is exactly what the lib/progs do.
Every single penny of corporate taxation is passed along to the individual consumers of that corporations goods and services as higher prices and to the stockholders as reduced dividends.
Corporations do not pay taxes; they only collect them. there is no phony 45 to 75%, as posited by Horwitz. It’s 100%.
Thank you for four excellent points.
Robert — I’m hip to your sentiment.
Jeff — great point almost never mentioned in such debates.
Drik — Always enjoy your thoughts. Oh, if we could limit the loving hate-mongering in politics to the lib/progs, we’d be a lot better off.
Drifter — I think Horwitz was trying to determine how much the employees took the hit as opposed to the stockholders or the customers. You drive the point home, though, by bringing us back to the 100%. The corporation takes 0 hit.
There’s another point to consider. The top management, the big stockholders, “the rich” that our pols want us to blame the problems on (as opposed to blaming it on the pols) will have much more power in not taking the brunt of the costs of taxes and regulations than will the employees (especially lower level ones) and the customers.
It’s analogous to when they say “tax the rich.” I’m not rich, but I know I’m going to be the one getting hit.
RE: Jeff – I agree, end corproate welfare-but then, how will the members fo Congress make the $$ they need for their re-elections? (Archer-daniels Midland, for oen, for years,w as a major contributor to both parties, and I BELEIVE- at times, to 2 candidates for the same seat.
AS FOR LIMITED LIABILITY: that was why corporations were set up- so that there can be mutliple owners, and each not responsible for something that they have no control over.
Take away limited liability for a corproation, and the economy would collapse ( even more then it has).