Speaking to a town hall-style gathering at a Miami airport hotel, the former Massachusetts governor repeated the line he first said last month at the Iowa State Fair. “I’ll communicate to the private sector, by the way, that we like you,” Romney said in response to a question about how to encourage banks to lend more money. “We like enterprise. I was in Iowa the other day, and people suggested that we just raise taxes on corporations.” He went on: “I told them, corporations are people. … Raising taxes on corporations is raising taxes on people.”

Mitt Romney is still speaking out on behalf of poor, downtrodden corporations

Well, yes ... in the same sense that taxing Soylent Green would also be raising taxes on people.

I admit I'm still not following why Romney is so insistent on this "corporations are people" line. If corporations are people, then Mitt Romney would be one of the most notorious serial killers in America. If corporations are people, then they would go to jail. If corporations are people, then buying and selling them would be really, really illegal.

But they're not. They're a legal construct through which a group of people can collectively engage in business while shielding themselves from direct personal liability. That's not an inherently evil thing, nor is it inherently good. If you want to treat them as the equivalent of individual people, that presents no end of problems, not least of which is the simple nonsensical-ness of such a thing. If you furthermore claim, as Romney and others do, that they are "people" when it comes to giving corporations rights (unlimited speech), but not "people" when it comes to enforcing responsibilities upon them (taxes, criminal liability for bad actions, and so forth), then you're just being a hypocrite.

Not that such a thing truly concerns "corporate personhood" advocates, mind you.

If corporations are people then they should be taxed at the same rates as any single person who makes that much money. They should be subject to the death penalty for harming or ending the lives of other corporations. Certainly, they should go to jail for crimes, and the nearest thing to that would be to remove the doctrine that holds officers of the corporation largely unaccountable for illegal actions by that company. Now that would be an interesting experiment.

Barring that, however, corporations are not people, just as a sofa is not a dog, and the planet Endor is not a pizza topping, and Mitt Romney—or should I say, "notorious serial murderer Mitt Romney"—would perhaps do well to spend more time defending actual people instead of fictitious ones.