My belief is that a &quot;corporation&quot; is a fiction brought into existence <i>by</i> the state—like copyright. Government gets to say what corporations do or don&#x27;t do, because without government, corporations just don&#x27;t exist as a &quot;thing&quot; in the first place—they just become groups of people who happen to be working together.<p><i>People</i> have inalienable rights, because people existed before governments did. <i>Corporations</i> don&#x27;t, because corporations exist as a contract between people-taken-as-a-group (i.e. the state) and people-taken-as-individuals.<p>This is a good and a bad thing: it means that precepts like &quot;corporations exist to pursue profit at all costs&quot; are not actually &quot;hardcoded&quot; into the laws of the universe, but are just part of the particular way the state has chosen to make corporations work. If we (people-taken-as-whole) stopped thinking that that was a good idea, we could just change the corporate &quot;goal conditions&quot;—and the world would suddenly be different.