THE ECONOMIC PAMPHLETEER: Agri-food corporations are not real people; why does it matter?

Abstract

First paragraph: Corporations are not real people. This may seem obvious, but for more than a hundred years the U.S. Supreme Court has recognized corporations as legal persons with many of the same constitutional rights as real people (Torres-Spelliscy, 2014). Why does it matter? Because corporations can do things that real people can’t and yet are immune to legal liabilities that real people must consider. The lack of economic com­petitiveness in agri-food markets is one conse­quence of treating corporations as real people. So is the lack of government protection of farm and food workers from exploitation and the natural environment from extraction and pollution. Recent examples include concerns about corporate price gouging following the COVID-19 pandemic (Reich, 2022) and the weakening of the Environ­mental Protection Agency’s authority to restrict corporate pollution (Feldscher, 2022). . . .