Are corporations people?

In a freshly-published profile of Mitt Romney, Benjamin Wallace-Wells considers the remarks – a supposed 'gaffe' – from another perspective:

The incident, in retrospect, did less to peg Romney as a creature of privilege than it did to reveal something deeper. For Romney, the corporation has long been an object of a certain idealism. It is something he has spent much of his adult life—first as a management-strategy consultant, then as CEO of the private-equity firm Bain Capital—working to perfect, to strip of its inefficiencies until it might function as a perfectly frictionless economic unit.

Consider, too, Ron Paul's response.