Today's the Supreme Court hears arguments in the Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialties lawsuits against the Affordable Care Act's contraception mandate. Conestoga Wood is based in Lancaster County, so the coverage here has been quite extensive.
I liked this Slate article on corporate personhood - I think it gets the metaphysics right, so to speak. And this article, also from Slate, points out the principal-agent cluster**** at the heart of all of this. If people bought their health insurance directly, Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood would not be in court today. But companies buy insurance on behalf of their employees, and so you have the government telling the companies what kind of insurance you have to buy. Hardly what you would call a clean, well-designed arrangement. When A and B are at loggerheads over how to treat C, and C barely gets a word in edgewise, chances are slim the result will end up optimal for C.
Which brings up this: Have you seen a single comment from a Hobby Lobby or Conestoga employee about any of this? I certainly haven't, and if Google has, its search function certainly isn't letting on. You would think that the people at the heart of all this would have something to say. Apparently either they don't, or no one's interested in listening.
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