Corporations weren't meant to become so powerful. The concept of protection from personal liability is what spurned entrepreneurial innovation and we have all benefitted from it tremendously. Without liability protection, the number of risks that have been undertaken would not have been and the Western world would look very different than it does today.
And to this day, there is no legal doctrine that says that a board of directors is so strictly beholden to shareholders that it must strictly pursue profits to please them. But of course, that is what major public corporations have become, and that's an important distinction to make. Most corporations are not publicly held. Neither are most LLPs, LLCs, S or C corporations. But that doesn't prevent those corporations from doing everything they can to maximize their profits at the cost of everyone and everything else. So publicly held corporations are not by necessity more destructive than any other entity.
The fact is that the profit motive works. But problems occur when the profits of one begin to damage the quality of life to others that are not competing in a given business. For example, when Corporation A begins dumping toxic shit upstream from where we get our drinking water so it can compete more successfully against Corporation B, by not disposing of its waste responsibly, it becomes a problem. And compounding that problem is the concept of the greatest profit possible combined with the perverted idea that capitalism = freedom, and so by restricting capitalism, tyranny isn't far behind. But that's where we sit as of now, and only through responsible and reasonable government regulation can we hope to change it.
