There may be hope for University of California – Berkeley, yet!

The “Loyal Opposition” columnist at the schools newspaper, Jacob Grant, explains the connection between “corporations” and “people” that escaped many when Mitt Romney used the phrase in a 2011 primary campaign stop in Iowa.

“Government,” as the saying goes, “is just a word for things we do together.” That may be so. But “Corporation,” as David Burge once quipped, “is just a word for things we do together voluntarily.”

Since the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Citizens United v. FEC in 2010, one of the favorite battle cries of the left has been that “Corporations are not people!” And in one sense, they are right: Corporations are not living, breathing, carbon-based beings. But this argument is nothing more than a straw man — and a much-abused one at that.

No one has ever seriously argued that corporations are flesh-and-blood people. The legal concept of “corporate personhood” in the United States has existed for nearly 200 years and plainly states, in the words of Supreme Court Justice Stephen J. Field, that corporations are “merely associations of individuals united for a special purpose and permitted to do business under a particular name.” The real issue has never been whether corporations themselves are people, but rather, whether these people forfeit their rights when they choose to associate with one another.

For all of the fear-mongering over corporate money in politics, Citizens United does little but reaffirm that people do not forgo their First Amendment right to speech when they form a corporation. The Supreme Court has long held and repeatedly affirmed that there is “no doubt” that the 14th Amendment extends equal protection to private corporations. Thus, people cannot be denied their right to speech merely due to the manner in which they organize themselves. Contrary to popular belief, the decision did not affect restrictions on direct campaign contributions or limits on contributions from individual donors. As bad as allowing people who have organized themselves together as a corporation to spend their own money to advocate their own interests is, the alternatives are far worse.

…Corporations aren’t literally flesh-and-blood people. But they are made up of people. And whatever your opinion may be of the political power or influence of corporations, all but the most fervent statists must conclude that the mere fact that people have organized themselves together is not reason enough to deny them their rights.