On 'legal persons'

In any developed nation-state, in any nation-state that really does have-and-honor a "rule of law", the 'legal fiction' that a 'corporation' is, in certain contexts and for certain purposes, equivalent to an actual human person, is paramount to the success of that nation-state and to the success and freedom of the society it rules. Denying the personhood of persons-in-groups is a necessary first-step for effectively establishing a tyranny.

This post is prompted by the following exchange between two of the leftists and/or atheists who infest Michael Egnor's blog:

JH: " @bachfiend: You're confusing "person" and "human being.""

bachfiend: "No. See the Wikipedia article on 'person'. The American Supreme Court has extended the definition of 'person' to include corporations. Restricting it to human beings is much more sensible."

This is what I said in response:

lying leftist: "The American Supreme Court has extended the definition of 'person' to include corporations."

Leftists can't be honest about anything, can they?

The US SC did not "extended the definition of 'person' to include corporations"; what it did was rule that leftists cannot artificially restrict the already-and-long-established expansion of the definition such that the groups-of-humans-working-in-concert that they like still count as legal persons but that the groups-of-humans-working-in-concert that they don’t like don’t count as legal persons.

The legal fiction that bodies of individual persons (hence the name, ‘corporation’) can be united to some common purpose and thus are, in certain contexts, actual persons, is a centuries-old (uniquely) Western concept-and-practice. The ‘corporation’ was developed in the Middle Ages (*), and its obvious benefit quickly lead to its use throughout Latin Christendom.

The ‘corporation’ is a major reason why the West - a tiny little sliver of the world, both in territory and in population - was able so quickly to rise to global pre-eminence in any endeavor one wishes to mention.


(*) i.e. the ‘corporation’ one more thing for haters-of-Christianity to pointlessly hate the Roman Catholic church about, as it was developed centuries before the Reformation.

lying leftist: "Restricting it to [actual] human beings is much more sensible."

No it doesn’t - and, in any event, lying leftists not willing to admit the personhood of a certain body of actual human beings: those not yet born or in the process of being born or who have managed to get born despite that some older person was trying to kill them at the time.

Denying or abrogating the legal status as ‘persons’ of human-persons-in-collective is actually a fine old leftist tactic for justifying the mass murders of masses of actual human persons - all one need do is:
1) focus on the membership of actual individual human beings in some collective body or group;
2) deny the personhood of that corporation of actual individual human beings;
2a) thus denying the personhood of the actual individual human beings which comprise the group;
3) murder them.
This tactic works whether one means to murder the kulaks, or the bourgeoisie, or the “lives unworthy of life”, or the Jews … or the unborn, or the old, or the crippled.

[edit: It also comes in handy when one wishes merely to fleece-and-loot, rather than outright murder, "the rich", or the primary creditors of, say, GM ... or the depositors of bank accounts]

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Of course, what this lying leftist *really* meant was “restricting [the definition of ‘person’ such that the groups-of-humans-working-in-concert that we leftists like still count as legal persons, while the groups-of-humans-working-in-concert that we leftists don’t like don’t count as legal persons] is much more sensible.”