Look, Mitt Romney is far too corporatist for my taste. I wrote in my column on him that his managerial mindset leads to his trusting Big Business-Big Government cooperation over the free market. This helps explain the individual mandate in RomneyCare, and plenty of his other policies.
And yes, “corporations are people, too, my friend,” is a stupid thing for a politician to tell a liberal heckler. And yes, presidential candidates need to be able to handle hecklers.
But none of the above facts make it okay for liberals to willfully or blindly distort what Romney was saying. Many liberals on Twitter and the blogs are acting as if Romney is standing up for corporations as if they have rights. One liberal blogger suggested that Romney was speaking about the legal idea of corporate personhood.
If you look at the rest of the transcript — which, to their credit, liberal Washington Post bloggers Greg Sargent and Brad Plumer provided in their posts on the incident — it’s clear Romney is talking about something else: that taxing corporations really means taxing people.
Plumer has a discussion of who ends up paying corporate taxes — mostly shareholders, also employees and customers (i.e., everyone). But it’s a good question to drill deeper into.
Look at the hecklers’ view of corporations:
So, this heckler seems to hold some idea of corporations as disembodied demons, which hold money in their pockets. This view of “enchanted” corporations really gets in the way of good discussions of economic policies.
But it’s also too simple to say corporations are just collections of people.
For one thing, there are group dynamics. Think of mobs, or teams. People think differently in groups and organizations then they do on their own, and organizations take on a spirit of their own.
Also, publicly held corporations involve a huge divorce between ownership and management that, I believe, often leads to corporate executives feeling more pressure and license to profit in immoral or unsavory ways — such as exploitation of the poor or the environment, or regulatory robbery and subsidy suckling.
It’s a good discussion to have. Romney, his heckler, and most liberal scribblers are not the right people with whom to have it.
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Hilarious correction: I originally wrote “Obama” once when I meant “Romney”
