Thank you for at least quoting Friedman before attacking policies that reflect a misreading of his words. (The link to Mr. Strain's article is broken.)

A business is an agent of its owners. Its mission is to accomplish whatever its owners intend it to accomplish, which is USUALLY to make as much money as is consistent with the owners' values. If you wouldn't rob a bank, we would not expect your company to rob a bank, even if that were the most "profitable" use of its resources.

A couple of aphorisms may be useful. Warren Buffett's "Price is what you pay, value is what you get" comes to mind. Maximizing shareholder value is not the same thing a maximizing stock price. If Enron's owners knew what Enron's management was up to, they would probably not have approved it, because Enron stock was not worth its price.

Goodhart's law also seems relevant: When a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a metric. A stock price is a useful measure of value only if it is not the target of action.

In a successful capitalist economy, one does well by doing good, or at least by not doing evil. But it's the job of the consuming public to make social responsibility a "product." If we think a company shouldn't lay off workers when Congress can't agree on a safety net for them, then we need to let entrepreneurs know that they will suffer at the sales counter if they lay people off. Do we really want that? Maybe, maybe not. Demanding social responsibility raises the risks of being in business, which raises the price businesses can afford to charge. Competition drives price to cost, but social responsibility is a cost.

Companies love to not compete. Cartels are all about not competing. So we demand that companies compete, and then we complain about how they compete. If companies agree among themselves not to lay off workers (because the company that does lay off workers has a pricing advantage), they violate the anti-trust laws. But if they negotiate individually with trade and industrial unions that will strike any company that does not make a good deal with its workers, that's just the market at work. Unions are how companies "collude" on labor terms without disadvantaging workers. Their demise, not management's aim to maximize value (which has been a constant), is why labor is doing so poorly.

It is not business's job to maximize stakeholder value. But it is stakeholders' job to make maximizing stakeholder value the best way to maximize shareholder value. The process by which that congruence arises, or doesn't, is called politics.