As institutional psychopaths, corporations are wont to remove obstacles that get into their way.

A century and a half after its birth, the modern business corporation, an artificial person made in the image of a human psychopath, now is seeking to remake real people in its image.

As a psychopathic creature, the corporation can neither recognize nor act upon moral reasons to refrain from harming others.

As the corporation's size and power grew, so did the need to assuage people's fears of it. The corporation suffered its first full-blown legitimacy crisis in the wake of the early-twentieth-century merger movement, when, for the first time, many Americans realized that corporations, now turned behemoths, threatened to overwhelm their social institutions and governments.

Goodwin has done the seemingly impossible-he has made economics comprehensible and funny.

The corporation, like the psychopathic personality it resembles, is programmed to exploit others for profit.

By leveraging their freedom from the bonds of location, corporations could now dictate the economic policy of governments.