It's a kludge that does more harm than good. Every other western country has ACLU-like organizations with comparable or better standing, and without the personhood nonsense.
I don't understand what you mean by "kludge". Either people who form legal entities retain their individual rights regardless of what laws are passed or they don't. That's all "corporate personhood" is. It doesn't mean their corporation gets a vote or can collect food stamps.
And I'll put U.S. free speech absolutism over most of Western Europe any day.
> Either people who form legal entities retain their individual rights regardless of what laws are passed or they don't.
That's not what corporate personhood is. Before corporate personhood became the law of the land, people retained all their individual rights despite forming legal entities. Neither does losing those rights happen in any other western country that does not recognize corporate personhood, btw.
> It doesn't mean their corporation gets a vote or can collect food stamps.
Oh, it does mean a corporation can lobby, which is very close to voting (and statistically, way more powerful than voting).
And it means a corporation can be found guilty of criminal negligence or even criminal behaviour, and yet not a single natural person is guilty. If you look at e.g. Germany, Sweden, or Norway - if there's criminal behaviour, the person responsible for it gets indicted EVEN if they did it as an officer of a corporation.
It's a kludge because, because for the small benefit it gives (allowing a legal entity to own property, which was solved in simpler ways all around the world), it lets the natural persons in control of a corporation evade criminal liability, and allows them to legally bribe, sorry, lobby with a force that they cannot without controlling said corporation -- at least not legally.
> And I'll put U.S. free speech absolutism over most of Western Europe any day.
Care to explain what you are talking about here, compared to (e.g.) Germany, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland? If you say "most", I guess at least ONE of these countries fall in your "Western Europe" group?
Did you, or do you, have experience living in western europe and/or the US, that you base that on?
That's sort of like estimating the tax rates from the length of the tax code (71000 pages in the us just for the federal tax code, less than 10000 in almost every other country on earth, most around 5000).
The number and content of laws is irrelevant. The way they are practiced is. E.g., if you read the 4th amendment you'd think the us government would need reasonable suspicion and a warrant before border search, wire tapping, stop and frisk, etc.
