In recent years super-PACs jumped into the political fray by making significant donations to political parties and candidates thus tilting political outcomes to suit their agendas. Super-PACs raise their money from individuals and corporations and spend it to promote their cause. Numerous commentators studied their impact on the American political landscape and highlighted its implications from a constitutionally driven perspective, anchored in the Free Speech clause of the First Amendment as it applies to corporate persons. In this Essay we analyze the phenomenon from a different vantage point, the prohibition to spend other people’s money in support of a cause which they refuse to endorse. We prove that although contributions made by private donors to super-PACs may sometimes be justified, no such redeeming grace is tenable in the case of contributions made by large public corporations. The distortion is caused by inviting corporations to identify their presumed political preferences by employing the decision rule current in corporate matters of “one share one vote” which allocates disproportionate power to the holders of large blocks of shares. Since political controversies ought to be governed by a different decision rule- “one person one vote” the distortion cannot be remedied through the intermediation of corporate players.

近年来，超级政治行动委员会通过向政党和候选人提供大量捐款而加入政治斗争，从而使政治结果倾斜以适应他们的议程。超级 PAC 从个人和公司那里筹集资金，并将其用于促进他们的事业。许多评论员研究了他们对美国政治格局的影响，并从宪法驱动的角度强调了它的影响，这一点以第一修正案的言论自由条款为基础，因为它适用于公司人员。在这篇文章中，我们从不同的角度分析了这一现象，即禁止将他人的钱用于支持他们拒绝支持的事业。我们证明，尽管私人捐助者对超级 PAC 的捐款有时是合理的，就大型公共公司的捐款而言，这种救赎恩典是站不住脚的。这种扭曲是由于邀请公司通过采用公司事务中现行的“一股一票”的决策规则来确定其假定的政治偏好而造成的，该规则将不成比例的权力分配给大块股份的持有人。由于政治争议应该由不同的决策规则来管理——“一人一票”，因此无法通过企业参与者的中介来纠正扭曲。