In the previous post, we discussed the fact that businesses are not buildings or parking lots or cubicles. They’re people. They’re owners, workers, shareholders, and customers. Taxing, regulating, and demonizing businesses does nothing to the buildings or parking lots or cubicles. It impacts people.

But left wing senators and congressmen, including Arizona’s own Raul Grijalva, want to go many steps beyond, to deal a crushing blow to business rights:

 . . . a constitutional amendment advanced by a number of Democratic representatives and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) which would, among other provisions, propose to abolish the constitutional rights of incorporated businesses, with the possible exception of rights held by “the press.” The measure would also impose a constitutional prohibition on (not just authorize official regulation of) such businesses’ engagement in “expenditures,” such as buying newspaper ads expressing their views, during initiative and referendum campaigns as well as elections for office.

Along with abolishing incorporated businesses’ rights, the Sanders proposal contains a further provision of high importance (flagged by Eugene Volokh) that would abolish the constitutional rights of any and all non-profits and similar private entities that are “established … to promote business interests,” and would impose on them the same constitutionally mandated silence during initiatives, referenda and the like. Note the results of this language, which we must presume are intentional: in, say, a fight over a ballot measure that would increase some business tax, the citizens’ committee organized to agitate against the tax would be forbidden to expend money upon a determination that it had been “established … to promote business interests.” Such a private group would also be deemed to have no constitutional rights of any other sort — rights against, say, having its meetings stormed and broken up by police. Meanwhile, the citizens’ committee organized to agitate for the tax would retain not only its rights to speak and to spend money on behalf of its views but also all its other constitutional rights. Rarely do politicians, in this country at least, make it so clear in advance that their intent is to silence their opponents.

This is one of those ideas that goes far beyond run-of-the-mill liberalism. It’s not the typical nanny statery you normally expect, couched in the language of compassion. This is authoritarianism. The equation is rather simple:

• This country is based on the notion that each of us, as sovereign individuals, have natural rights,

• One of our natural rights is the right to provide for ourselves,

• That right, by extension, leads to our right to operate in a free market,

• That right does not evaporate if sovereign individuals choose to cooperate in a group,

• Thus, businesses have natural rights.

Any effort to strip businesses of personhood is a direct assault on fundamental human rights. It is an act one expects in an authoritarian state, not in a country whose basis is in individual sovereignty and natural rights.

But that is what we would expect, I suppose, from people as far to the left as Bernie Sanders and Raul Grijalva.