Funny thing happened while I was writing the post about corporations. I got side tracked by the whole birth control thing and I felt the need to write something about it. The interesting thing though was when I went back to the corporations post I realized my view on the whole topic had changed. When I set out to write the piece I wanted to talk about bringing the human factor back into business. The problem, I realized, was it would go against the very nature of the institution to implement something effective, and there was no guaranty we could get it right in any scalable way. One problem was I had adopted, if just for analogy reasons, the idea that corporations were people. Like I said in the post, if we were to treat corporations as people we’d have to acknowledge that they have psychopathic tendencies. The break to write about contraception shook loose what was actually wrong with my thinking. Our constitution was written for people, in fact our entire government is written for people, not institutions.
This clearly obvious statement has profound implications. The furor over the contraceptive policy was mostly raised by the Catholic bishops saying it encroached on the catholic church’s religious freedom which was a violation of the church’s first amendment rights. Here’s the problem the church doesn’t have first amendment rights the people apart of the church do. So much of our political discussions become wars fought via proxy. We do this mostly out of convenience. True democracy would have people individually voting for each proposed bill, treaty and budget. This is highly impractical for a variety of reasons but one simple but important reason is logistics. We therefore assign people to represent our interest in a variety of ways. One of the ways is by building institutions that can advocate for our interest. This building of institutions does not endow them with inalienable rights as our creator did for us.
My point isn’t that institutions are bad, quite the contrary, institutions are vital to our community and society. I just want to re-emphasize the distinction between the rights of the people, and the institutions that are created to represent them. I want a discussion on what rights we want to give institutions. Obviously institutions have the right to exist, but they don’t and shouldn’t have the right to vote. The main question of citizens united was whether or not private institutions could raise and spend unlimited funds. But again this should again fall back to the ideas of how individual people can participate. There are and should be limits on how much money an individual person can donate to a candidate. People think this is to avoid undue influence on the candidate, but this has as much to do with the undue influence it has on the elections. Institutions should have similar limitations but relative to the size of the populations the organization purports to represent. If for example the limit on one person contributing to a campaign was 5 dollars, then the limit of an organization consisting of 100 people would be $500 dollars. The caveat I’d like to see though is the necessity of recurring active agreement of the individual members. The reason is simple large organizations such as the chamber of commerce and SEUI both claim to have the support of their millions of members. This however is clearly deceptive as the individual members of these organizations may have a variety of reasons to be apart of these organizations but have a negative opinion of the organizations political positions. An agreement on each particular measure would again be impractical and unwieldy however annual tallies of member acceptance would ensure these organizations were pursuing the actual interests of its membership.
Good strong institutions are the bed rock of this nation. The Catholic church expanded hospitals to areas that desperately needed health care. Unions have made workplaces safer and more equal. Even the NRA, regardless of how you feel about their politics, has a tremendous outreach program about gun safety and the importance of handling weapons in a responsible manner. At the same time we must acknowledge that these institutions and others wield a tremendous amount of influence. In a democracy shouldn’t we ensure that influence is proportional to the amount of individuals who actually support them?
This clearly obvious statement has profound implications. The furor over the contraceptive policy was mostly raised by the Catholic bishops saying it encroached on the catholic church’s religious freedom which was a violation of the church’s first amendment rights. Here’s the problem the church doesn’t have first amendment rights the people apart of the church do. So much of our political discussions become wars fought via proxy. We do this mostly out of convenience. True democracy would have people individually voting for each proposed bill, treaty and budget. This is highly impractical for a variety of reasons but one simple but important reason is logistics. We therefore assign people to represent our interest in a variety of ways. One of the ways is by building institutions that can advocate for our interest. This building of institutions does not endow them with inalienable rights as our creator did for us.
My point isn’t that institutions are bad, quite the contrary, institutions are vital to our community and society. I just want to re-emphasize the distinction between the rights of the people, and the institutions that are created to represent them. I want a discussion on what rights we want to give institutions. Obviously institutions have the right to exist, but they don’t and shouldn’t have the right to vote. The main question of citizens united was whether or not private institutions could raise and spend unlimited funds. But again this should again fall back to the ideas of how individual people can participate. There are and should be limits on how much money an individual person can donate to a candidate. People think this is to avoid undue influence on the candidate, but this has as much to do with the undue influence it has on the elections. Institutions should have similar limitations but relative to the size of the populations the organization purports to represent. If for example the limit on one person contributing to a campaign was 5 dollars, then the limit of an organization consisting of 100 people would be $500 dollars. The caveat I’d like to see though is the necessity of recurring active agreement of the individual members. The reason is simple large organizations such as the chamber of commerce and SEUI both claim to have the support of their millions of members. This however is clearly deceptive as the individual members of these organizations may have a variety of reasons to be apart of these organizations but have a negative opinion of the organizations political positions. An agreement on each particular measure would again be impractical and unwieldy however annual tallies of member acceptance would ensure these organizations were pursuing the actual interests of its membership.
Good strong institutions are the bed rock of this nation. The Catholic church expanded hospitals to areas that desperately needed health care. Unions have made workplaces safer and more equal. Even the NRA, regardless of how you feel about their politics, has a tremendous outreach program about gun safety and the importance of handling weapons in a responsible manner. At the same time we must acknowledge that these institutions and others wield a tremendous amount of influence. In a democracy shouldn’t we ensure that influence is proportional to the amount of individuals who actually support them?
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