Letter: Is a corporation a person?

There is the relatively new question about whether a corporation is a person or not. This affects many things, most notably the ability of the corporation to donate to a political candidate. A corporation is, without a doubt, not a person. However, there are people behind the corporation who created it, invested in it and work for it now. These people realize that with a stroke of a pen, the government can affect its profitability and viability both directly and indirectly.

A case in point is the housing market. You may have heard in many commercials by the National Association of Realtors that for every house bought, two jobs are created. Of course this sounds like a desirable outcome. Accordingly, the government reacted by saying every person should be able to own a home, so it started backing home mortgages, making it easy for people to obtain a loan to buy a house. However, there are many constraints to this theory. Right now, there are about 14 million people unemployed. If this theory held true, we should just get 7 million homes purchased and we would have no unemployment!

Wait: how did the resources become available to build and purchase these houses? They had to come from somewhere, and most typically, the sources come from the corporations because they pay the largest portion of their income in taxes. Now, the people who are trying to make the corporation and their income survive can't find the resources to make their efforts viable. Thus, they need to lobby the government to get the resources back, and it becomes a push and pull between corporations and individuals. In order to solve the problem, the government needs to get out of the business of playing "favorites" and let the free market dictate the resources.   

Tony Rouse

Graduate assistant, accounting