What kind of a person is a corporation? What kind of a person ought it to be? Here is one philosophy. Add your own in the comments.

Rights corporations have

  1. Right to exercise religion by not paying for employee insurance programs that cover contraception
  2. Right to make unlimited independent political expenditures, even in secret
  3. Right to refuse a government safety inspection unless served with a search warrant
  4. Right to make contracts and sue
  5. Right not to be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law
  6. Right to associate freely (or not) in religious groups, fraternities, trade unions, or sporting clubs
  7. Right to trial by jury
  8. Right to avoid "double jeopardy"

Rights corporations don't have but should

  1. Right to look at your spouse with an indescribable mixture of joy and terror when she announces she's pregnant
  2. Right to sit on an oceanside boardwalk, inhale deeply of salt as the sun lashes your corneas, and ponder why you don't do this more often
  3. Right to wonder if your children will inherit your worries
  4. Right to fuck on the floor of your first house with all of your life's belongings still in boxes and the power off, because you've goddamn made it
  5. Right to tell everyone in the building that you, too, voted for the Democrat referenced on your bumper-stickered hatchback, when in fact you haven't seen your voter's registration card since five moves ago
  6. Right to choose any three of the five to pay this month: rent, car, student loan, credit card, and groceries
  7. Right to miss your dad after, or during, the long illness
  8. Right to fart when you have to, and no one's around at the moment, even though you're certain someone will pass by in the next few seconds and just, like, know
  9. Right to fall in love with Upstate New York or Northeast Kingdom or Appalachia or the Ozarks or the Okefenokee or whatever wilderness you summer in, to wonder how you can transport your work and your life there, contemplate the impossibility of it, then remind yourself of the meanness and smallness of rural dwellers compared to your urban enclave, then to sadly and wistfully ponder the eventuality of a major civil break in America between the city and the country folk
  10. Right to look at an American Express points statement and briefly consider how many dollars in spending those points represented over the past decade of life
  11. Right to sit and force yourself to cry over something, even when everything seems fine, maybe especially then, because sometimes you just have to
  12. Right to laugh at yourself for ever thinking anything in high school or college was a matter of life and death, then to google your old sweetheart and imagine what could have been
  13. Right to stare at a fighter jet taking off in the Virginia sunrise, or two grad students making eyes at each other in the coffee shop over a book on time in the Victorian novel, or the too-cool mom with the sailor tattoo under the rips in her Buffalo Exchange denim who's pointing at the Vigée Le Brun in the Met program catalog and chatting about it with her precocious bob-cut daughter on the Brooklyn-bound L after a free museum day, and to wonder whether you've really done everything you can with the short time nature or Jehovah or the cosmic void gave you