This doctrine of irresponsibility was gobbled up by businesses. It gave them (us) permission to switch from the post-WW2 cooperative way of doing business to an extractive model: get the most you can from workers, suppliers, host communities and other stakeholders without shares. Externalize all the costs you can get away with fobbing off on others.
The Hayek / Friedman / Chicago School fanbois need to address the biggest externalized cost of all: disposal of CO2, methane, and other greenhouse gases. If the social responsibility of business were to increase its profits a century from now, maybe the Friedman Doctrine would be helpful. But, yeah, no. As it is, the Friedman Doctrine means "take all the money and run."
Lots of plutocrats argue for a guaranteed basic income. Why? if Amazon / FB / Doordash / Uber impoverish everybody, nobody will have any money to spend on Amazon / FB / Doordash / Uber.
That's all a consequence of the Friedman Doctrine.
The social responsibility of businesses is to increase its profits because businesses shouldn't have social responsibility, people should.
People complain that corporations and businesses have too much impact and control over our society (which I agree with) and then in the same breath complain that they don't take on enough social responsibility. These are incompatible statements. Businesses should not have any social responsibility other than doing the thing for which they exist: make money. All other social responsibilities, such as ensuring we live in free, fair, and just society, fall to the people and their representatives.
Unfortunately, in our current situation, the people's representatives have spinelessly kowtowed to businesses and corporations and are completely unwilling to embrace any such social responsibility. But the blame and fault for this lies solely at the feet of these representatives and their governments (and, to an extent, the people who continue to elect them).
Friedman may have written them a nice excuse, but capitalists have always behaved this way. Look at the behavior of the robber barons around the turn of the 20th century for example.
The question is not one of motivation, but what allowed them to get away with it? So I would like to combine your comment with the root from another thread: "Business managed to exploit a number of crises to break the power of labor unions. The gold standard had nothing to do with it: sticking with gold would not force management to share productivity gains with labor."
Among the 'number of crises' being that the boom from rebuilding after WWII was basically over, which has also been mentioned in other comments.
This doctrine of irresponsibility was gobbled up by businesses. It gave them (us) permission to switch from the post-WW2 cooperative way of doing business to an extractive model: get the most you can from workers, suppliers, host communities and other stakeholders without shares. Externalize all the costs you can get away with fobbing off on others.
The Hayek / Friedman / Chicago School fanbois need to address the biggest externalized cost of all: disposal of CO2, methane, and other greenhouse gases. If the social responsibility of business were to increase its profits a century from now, maybe the Friedman Doctrine would be helpful. But, yeah, no. As it is, the Friedman Doctrine means "take all the money and run."
Lots of plutocrats argue for a guaranteed basic income. Why? if Amazon / FB / Doordash / Uber impoverish everybody, nobody will have any money to spend on Amazon / FB / Doordash / Uber.
That's all a consequence of the Friedman Doctrine.