Whether we call it "corporate personhood" or "the state", I think you and I do not disagree that much. Let me try restating my premise:

I make personal decisions based on the effect those decisions will have in my lifetime. I make family decisions based on the effect those decisions will have in my or my children's lifetimes. Presumably, a corporation should make decisions based on the effect they will have in the corporations lifetime which should, because it's a corporation, be regarded as unbounded.

The problem is that responsibility is a slippery thing with respect to corporations. If the CEO makes a decision which will result in disaster in 100 years, is the CEO responsible when that disaster occurs? or will the CEO be dead? So then the shareholders should be responsible, right? except how many current shareholders will still be shareholders in 100 years? Sure, stocks take the future into account in the price, but how far into the future? At some point, the "outlook is hazy" and stocks put decreasing emphasis on outcomes the further into the future those outcomes will be realized. So who is responsible?

My premise is that, if left to market forces alone, no one is responsible! That means that market economics, alone, cannot make wise 100 year decisions. Ah, but what about states? A state whose corporations have all made bad long-term decisions is not going to last very long, so that over a long enough time scale there will be an evolution toward states which can force responsibility for long term decisions onto someone. I would argue that this is at least partly the reason for the rise in representative forms of government: when the governing responsibility is amortized over the entire population, decisions will likely be made with an eye to at least two lifetimes (the classic "won't somebody think of the children", or "our children will have to pay off our debt").

The bottom line is that sometimes governments have to make decisions that seem at odds with the markets, because they must be responsible for the long-term consequences in a way that corporations are not.

Let's take your R&D scientist, and I'll turn the problem on its head: Given that I have 20 years in which to recoup my expenses, why would I study diseases of the poor or cure short term illnesses? The poor can't pay much for my pills, and a pill to cure pneumonia will only make money for a week or two per person. So what do we end up with? Statins! Lot's and lots of statins! High cholesterol is a disease of the rich, and once you start on statins you have to keep taking statins the rest of your life.

What don't we have? Antibiotics! In fact, most people don't talk about it, but there is a looming antibiotic crisis on the horizon. I've spoken with an expert on the appearance of antibiotic resistance who has studied MRSA and VRSA, and he gives us 20 years until we're basically out of effective antibiotics. You don't have to take my word for it, though...just look at the timeline for the discovery of new antibiotics, and how much it slows down there toward the end: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_antibiotics.

So what of the FDA bureaucrat? It's a straw man unless you can tell me the name of the person responsible for approving thalidomide for use as an anti-morning-sickness treatment. The individual bureaucrats have little to no incentive to not simply "follow the science", but as a society we have every incentive to have a safety net that keeps us from having to support a generation of armless individuals.

This is already getting a bit long, but as for the PBGC? Well, so what? Everyone lobbies the government and gets to give less money to the government and put more money in their pockets. That's a government failure if ever I've seen one. Of course, its not surprising given how close we've allowed corporate interests and government to get.

I was discussing this just the other day with a friend, and if it were up to me to fix the government, you know what I'd do? Every federal politician is set for life! Food, housing, vacations anywhere you like...it's yours! The taxpayer cost for the number of politicians that affect our lives with their decisions would be negligible, but it would effectively remove any and all impact that special interests could have on politicians. Also, if you knew that, when you went into the voting booth, you'd be rewarding someone with a lifetime free pass...well, I bet you'd think about that choice a bit harder than you do now, right?