This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, April 12, 2012.

I'm Caleb Brown.

If you decide that rights are just for people, and those rights do not then extend to the corporations people own, you're going down a path

that ends in a world of less privacy.

Jim Harper, Director of Information Policy Studies at the Cato Institute offers his thoughts.

The Citizens United decision led to a rather bizarre sort of claim and that is that this is a United decision declared once and forever that corporations

are people when of course the decision really said that people who get together informed corporations

then do not lose their rights when it comes to free speech.

So it brought back up this idea of corporate personhood. The opponents of the

since United decision use that to say well there's all sorts of things now that

are going to happen that are terrible for our democracy if we allow this corporate

personhood to continue.

It's a fascinating issue and area because there's become a popular form of sloganeering where people say,

I oppose Citizens United, I don't believe that corporations are people or things that things like rights are only for

humans and no matter what issue area you work on you come across in in discussion

colloquy you come across in discussion and

across people who make these claims.

And it's fascinating to actually explore

the claims with them.

I've had the opportunity to do this, and I'll share it with them. I've had the opportunity to do this and I'll share it with you. On Twitter

the other day someone said to me, I opposed Citizens United. Rights are only for

humans. And I pressed him over some period of time to expand on that

...