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Let's assume that rights are transferable or transitive, which they are not.
What then of organizations that only exist on paper as objects of ownership, that contain no people or people that have no rights? Are these rights revocable by the participants?
This is evidently not the source of such rights, corporations are treated as facsimile persons, and the rights they are granted are legal fictions that only exist by analogy and have no serious philosophical backing.
They may be agents of people who have rights, but they themselves possess no such thing.
Such an organization cannot do anything without a person being involved somehow. That includes corporations. If it does not do anything, the question of rights is moot.
The idea that if I make a film about how bad Hillary Clinton is, it's my right, but if I get together with a bunch of other people and make a better film about how bad Hillary Clinton is, that can be censored, makes no sense. And the no-rights frame makes it absolutely pernicious, because it means there's no reason the law cannot be such that organizations are forbidden from denigrating Hillary Clinton, but not from praising her.
There's a lot more to being a corporation than just working together. Incorporating provides considerable legal and financial protections which you wouldn't get on the basis of just working together with others. So in the proposed schema there's actually nothing stopping you from getting together with your collaborators and making the anti-HRC film of your dreams - but if you accidentally flood an entire town with sewage while recreating the tour bus moment you won't have the legal protections that a corporation would. If you're going to donate vast amounts of money to a political party/candidate or otherwise get seriously involved in politics, I don't think there's anything unreasonable about requiring you to give up the protections of corporate personhood to do so.
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How about you making that film on behalf of people who are not allowed to make such a film by themselves, such as Hillary Clinton and her agents?
The idea that you can launder bribes through this mechanism should be an argument against this being a coherent framing of the world rather than for it.
And that's regardless of whether you view bribing politicians as something that ultimately is a right or freedom.
I don't view it as that binary because to me the whole frame is wrong. Applying rights as a category to something that's not an individual is a category error that yields strange results as legal fictions always end up doing.
Hillary Clinton is certainly allowed to make a film about how bad she is, or how good she is.
Not beyond certain limits of funding she isn't. Isn't that the whole controversy?
Candidates can spend as much as they want on their own campaigns.
But their campaigns are not allowed to accept donations higher than a set ceiling from specific contributors, which is why PACs exist in the first place.
Can you please stop weaseling and discuss the substance of the issue. We both know how post Citizens United political campaigns are structured.
Is your view that such limits are not constitutional as well? Because if they are in effect impossible to enforce, it's all a very silly.
That's a restriction on an organization, which is what I'm arguing against here.
Campaign finance limits are certainly very iffy constitutionally... and the fact that they are enforced so blatantly unevenly makes me think that even if they pass Constitutional muster, they're still a bad idea.
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