All sorts of pundits believe that the primary duty and the primary obligation for public for-profit corporations are to, above all, make money on behalf of its employees, Board of Directors, and shareholders. If, this premise indeed be true, than essentially for-profit corporations, which are artificial entities, are thereby created in order to maximize their profits, and hence have no material inherent obligation to the general public, at all. That sort of mindset is the very reason, why corporations need to be regulated, monitored, and reined in, because when the making of money and profit is the main impetus behind any corporation, then that making of that money, colors all decision making by that corporation, frequently to the ill effect of the public and society, at large.
That is to say, when money is the god for corporations, then those that believe such will go to extraordinary lengths to serve that god, faithfully. This thus means, that many corporations will cheat, collude, pollute, exploit, lie, deceive, use, corrupt, and do just about anything in order to make that money, for that is the driving force behind the engine of their desires. This doesn't necessarily mean that all corporations are inimical to the public, but rather it definitely means that a significant portion of those corporations, care little for the public interest, and care a whole heck of a lot, about making their profit, and will thereby do what needs to be done, to assure themselves of that profit, come what may.
Corporations are incredibly powerful, because the biggest and strongest corporations, have gargantuan sums of capital to operate with, that dwarfs not just individuals of modest net worth, but even dwarfs those that have immense personal worth, because corporations have market capitalizations of even $1 trillion and above, which is a truly staggering amount of money in the hands of a specific company; which essentially means that the only possible entity that can hope to rein in corporations with immense capital, is the national government, itself.
Because corporations, are subject to rules and regulations, in regards to, for instance, to the environment, to labor, and to finance, then those corporations are absolutely obligated to conform wholly to those rules and regulations. Further to the point, as artificial entities created by the state, the state therefore has the power to enact and to thereby enforce upon corporations, the general rule of law, that each corporation, in its behavior and in its operation, has an inherent obligation, to, above all else, conduct itself in the public interest. In other words, when corporations are not subject to the oversight of the public interest, as enforced by the national government, then, in a way, those corporations have morphed into being something so created, which may effectively ignore the public good.
The pursuit of profit by corporations, above all else, is never going to be a good thing, because the lust for money must be tempered by the obligation that corporations have to the very people that created the foundation of their being. This signifies that a more robust national government must regulate to a far greater extent, corporations, and in particular, those corporations that have undue influence upon the economy, in which the people's voice has effectively been silenced.