They literally do. Plenty of legal and regulatory constructs apply only to corporations. Limited liability is a thing that is available by forming a corporation, as is carrying out an SEC filing and selling stock. A corporation can also survive, as a legal construct, the deaths of all founding members.
Those constructs are part of the modern, legal features of corporations, but they are not the essential nature of what corporations are.
Remove those features, and things would change a lot, but you'd still have 'corporations' of a kind.
Corporations are also not primarily profit driven - the owners may are - but corporations themselves 'do things' which will result in a lot of externalities and surpluses generated elsewhere, only some of the profits may come back to the shareholders.
Shareholders may very well be the smallest beneficiaries of an endeavour. They have certain rights, but other groups have rights as well: lenders have first rights to the assets, and so do other creditors such as suppliers. Employees have legal rights including collective bargaining.
Buyers may have incredible power over companies such that they suck out all of the profits (see: selling to Apple).
Debtors have all of the power during restructring.
Many companies exist at the whim of the employees - like big Auto, who pay super high wages and benefits relative to the job. Possibly government employees as well.
Some Execs, by virtue of a weak or allied Board, have all the power and suck out vast profits that would otherwise go to investors.
> Limited liability allows companies to take risks that no sane individual or group of individuals would take on their own.
No, limited liability allows people to use corporations as a tool, which includes misusing them to take risks that should not be taken.
> Limited liability is precisely the factor that lets corporations act as agents instead of extensions of individual or group human goals.
No, limited liability is the factor that lets people use corporations to further goals that benefit them, including goals that are harmful to society as a whole.
It's still people doing things, not corporations as magical agents independent of people. Thinking of a corporation as doing nefarious things as a separate agent from the people running it just distracts attention from the actual problem, which is people who want to do nefarious things misusing whatever tool they can.
