Business exists to make a profit, not satisfy a bunch of so-called stakeholders who have no actual stake (money at risk as an investment or loan) in the corporation. If someone “feels” aggrieved by what a business does, they can sue. If they have suffered actual damage, they should win. That’s how actual capitalism and a rational legal system would work. From Thomas DiLorenzo at lewrockwell.com:
In private business “[t]here is no need to limit the discretion of subordinates by any rules or regulations other than that underlying all business activities, namely, to render their operations profitable.”—Ludwig von Mises, Bureaucracy, p. 46
In this quote from his classic 1944 book Bureaucracy, Mises explains why private, for-profit businesses need not, and should not, be bureaucratic and entangled in rules and regulations mandated from the top of an administrative hierarchy. Instead, they should, make the best use of decentralized “knowledge of time and place” to do their jobs. Mises’ admonition that the focus of capitalist enterprises is and should be to “make a profit” later became, in the hands of Chicago School economists, “maximize shareholder value.” This view is most widely associated with Milton Friedman and was accepted by American corporate management, for the most part, for many years.
Then in 2018 Blackrock CEO Larry Fink, who managed $6 trillion in corporate assets at the time, publicly insisted that corporate executives should focus on “stakeholders” (i.e., virtually everyone connected in any way with a corporation) instead of shareholders. This was followed in August of 2019 by 200 CEOs of major corporations issuing a declaration that maximizing shareholder value was no longer their paramount goal; adding value to all “stakeholders” was.
